


the universe is not against you

by seekrest, thesemovingparts



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: (and maybe some therapy), (but it gets better), (he definitely needs therapy), (more like college drop out), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, College Student Peter Parker, Comic Book Science, Existential Crisis, F/M, Gen, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker is a Little Shit, Peter says Fuck, Peter’s Not Having a Good Time™️, canon nudged to the left
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:35:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29086221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekrest/pseuds/seekrest, https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesemovingparts/pseuds/thesemovingparts
Summary: It’s not possible, not possible, not possible.“Pete?”It’s a breath of a thing, hopeful and scared and loud in Peter’s ringing ears. Because put all together, the location and the voice and the face, it feels like his feet have been sucked in by the earth and his lungs have been entirely removed from his body.He’s looking at a dead man.“Might be time to stop drinking, Parker,” he mutters to himself.He’s looking at Tony Stark.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 409
Kudos: 372





	1. it’s hard out here (but so is everything)

**Author's Note:**

> Have you ever thought: wow what if Peter in the MCU had the same chaotic, exhausted energy as Peter B. in ITSV, but younger and with a lot more existential dread?
> 
> We certainly have. Back at it again, with the two clowns who never know when to quit. 
> 
> We hope you enjoy :)
> 
> Love, 
> 
> Prem & Seek
> 
> (p.s. Fic title and all chapter titles from [“Dissect the Bird” by John Craigie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn-wGaM7x5c&ab_channel=JohnCraigie-Topic))

On a Friday afternoon in the middle of summer, Peter Parker wakes up with a snort. 

He knows that it’s the afternoon before he even moves because the sun is streaming through a nearby window and tinting the inside of his eyelids an unpleasant orangey-red, but he buries his face further into the cushion underneath him anyway. 

The idea of getting up from the couch is going to take him a minute to accept with the headache pounding behind his still-closed eyes and the cotton mouth making his teeth taste like actual, literal garbage and he wonders for a moment how he had once gotten up with any consistency for classes back when he was still the studious kind of young adult with a degree on the way and _prospects_ for the future. 

He supposes that doesn’t matter at the moment, because as he finally cracks open his eyes to May’s old, forest green couch underneath him and his wallet and shoes on the floor beside the coffee table, the only thing that _does_ matter is the potential for coffee. 

Coffee will make this morning better. (His nearly dead phone tells him it’s one o’clock in the afternoon. Still feels like morning, though, after the like-the-dead sleep on the couch of the night before.)

As Peter finally manages to heave himself first to sit, and then after a beat and a breath to get his bearings, to stand, he glances down the hall towards the cracked door to his bedroom. He leaves that door closed when he isn’t home, leaves it closed a lot of the time when he _is_ home too, which is how he knows that May must have peeked in looking for him when she got up this morning before finding him on the couch. 

He takes off the belt that he fell asleep wearing on his way to the kitchen, tossing it back towards the couch with semi-accurate aim before unplugging the toaster and plugging in the coffee maker in its stead. 

With one hand rubbing the sleep out of his tired eyes and one on the handle to the freezer door, Peter sees the bright orange post-it note that has become one of May’s primary ways of communicating with him. 

“I’ll stop,” she had told him a month prior. “When you start charging your phone on a daily basis like a regular person.” 

Peter sighs, and he unsticks the post-it from the door and feels his body sink somehow even deeper into the trench he drags his feet through on the daily as he reads it. 

_Off to work. Please take the recycling on your way out._

_Love you_

She’s drawn a little heart next to that last bit, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that when Peter turns to look at the recycling bin he realizes she hadn’t just peeked into his room this morning but had, in fact, cleaned up a little bit for him as well. 

It wasn’t a particularly fast accumulation, but looking at it all gathered up in one spot like this gives Peter a heightened awareness of why he’s been putting off cleaning up. It’s the sound the glass makes all clinking together as he carries it down to the dumpster out back that pierces him with fresh guilt, so he ignores it for the moment and grabs the coffee grounds out of the freezer like had been his original intent. 

It’s one of the more entirely unsubtle ways that May has been trying to have this conversation with him in recent months. It’s passive aggressive at worst, but only because the last handful of times she’s tried to have a forthright conversation about it, Peter has spent five to seven days sleeping on Ned’s couch and ignoring her calls. 

So she leaves notes, and she kisses him on the forehead when he comes home before midnight, and Peter makes her dinner whenever he can find the energy because the guilt is corrosive and the weight of it is too familiar sometimes, like a mountain of concrete on his back. 

Peter changes while his coffee brews and puts on extra deodorant in lieu of a shower and closes the door to his room behind him as he slings his backpack over one shoulder. He burns his mouth drinking one cup too fast and then pours the rest of the pot into one of May’s travel mugs. 

A fresh battery slots into the bottom of his camera with ease and exactly forty-seven minutes after first waking up, Peter Parker is out the door. 

He forgets to take out the recycling. 

***

Peter technically got his job at the Bugle before he dropped out of school. 

Back then though it had been a side gig, and he was mostly just a freelancer that Jameson used to get high quality Spider-Man pictures. Back then it had been ironic and a little bit funny and an easy way to make some extra cash. 

Now though, it’s his only non-vigilante job and it’s an unironic livelihood and he’s not just taking his camera out on web shooter joy-rides for fun and getting to profit off of them. Now, he has to go on actual assignments and today that means attending Brooklyn School of Science and Technology’s career fair. 

It’s part of the reason he had had such a rough night, and why he now has a low-level hangover on the subway at two o’clock in the afternoon. Because he’s twenty-one years old but he had once been sixteen and attending a similar job fair at a similar school with similar kids who he may not have seen in years but knows from social media are graduating and going off to grad school or jobs at the places at which they had once dreamt of taking unpaid internships. 

The fair is already in full-swing by the time he steps inside and slides his lens cap into the back pocket of his jeans. 

He starts with some wide shots, some establishing views of the school gym and its lines and lines of booths. And maybe he takes more of those than he could ever possibly need because his pity party is still raging on and he is dreading stepping into the crowd of eager high schoolers with their stacks of pamphlets and youthful optimism. 

Eventually he has to dive in though, keeping out of the way as much as he can in the given circumstances and only talking to people when he needs to get names for captions. He’s keeping his head down, and so it’s entirely his own fault that he doesn’t notice the OsCorp booth until he’s right up on top of it. 

“Parker?”

Peter’s head swings up from looking at the LCD screen on the back of his camera and he starts about three different sentences with incomprehensible almost-words before he manages to blurt out--

“Harry? What are you-- I mean....?”

“How’d I get stuck doing community outreach?” Harry Osborn snorts, leaning back in a folding chair with his feet propped up precariously on the table at his booth. He doesn’t seem to be doing all that much outreach to the community from that position, but he’s _there_ which is something in and of itself. 

“Well… Yeah,” Peter chuckles awkwardly under his breath, stepping out of the foot traffic so he’s right beside the OsCorp booth now. 

“Pissed off dear old Dad,” Harry shrugs. 

“So same old hat then,” Peter deadpans with a wry grin. It’s easy to put on a show for Harry, always has been because of the way Harry puts on a show for everyone. 

They don’t talk as frequently as they did when they were both at ESU, but once you know how to speak Harry’s language, it’s kind of a hard skill to shake. 

“Hey, I’m not the only one who got the shit sandwich,” Harry motions to Peter’s press pass. “How’d you piss off the boss man this time to get stuck with this gig?” 

“Who knows,” Peter shrugs. “I think just looking at my face puts Jameson in a bad mood at this point. It’s fucking pavlovian.” 

“Well,” Harry cocks his head to the side, studying Peter as though through a magnifying glass in such a way that makes Peter push away the urge to squirm. “Can’t blame him, really. I mean look at you.”

Peter knows he looks like shit, and on top of that he knows this is Harry’s way of asking whether or not he’s doing okay, but still he puts on his best expression of mock-affrontedness and says, “You wound me, Osborn,” as flatly as he can manage. 

Harry smirks at him, and Peter can almost watch as he visibly decides not to press the issue because that’s not who they are to each other. It may have been at one point, there had been the potential for their easy banter at the back of a freshman biology lecture to turn into real and long-lasting friendship, but by the time Peter was ending semesters with more withdrawals and fails than actual usable credits he was also not exactly in the headspace to be maintaining friendships let alone making new ones. 

“Well, are you gonna get a glamor shot while you’re here or not?” Harry puts his hands behind his head in a pose that would have looked goofy on anyone lacking his confidence. 

Peter lifts his camera and clicks it twice in quick succession. 

“Front page,” he says as he steps back out into the sea of people. “Enjoy your community service,” he adds over his shoulder as he steps away. 

He can feel Harry’s eyes on him until he turns the corner and starts down the adjacent aisle of booths, at which point the exhaustion of basic social interaction begins to mingle with the exhaustion of whatever it was that made him decide to sleep on the couch last night instead of in his bed a few feet down the hall. 

But nothing is simple and nothing is without emotionally wrought reminders of where his life is at these days anymore so he is almost immediately confronted by a booth far more crowded than Harry’s. 

Stark Industries-- the dream of every nerdy engineering student-to-be. 

Peter half expects to see Pepper Potts standing there, either because that’s just how his day is going or because he knows her modus operandi pretty well these days. 

It’s not often that she makes public appearances anymore, mostly showing up for major company announcements and not much else. But she’s still Pepper, and in the years since Peter’s return to life he’s noticed that she likes this sort of thing. 

She likes low-key environments and meeting enthusiastic young people and he’s sure it has to do with the whole transition to motherhood as much as it does the loss of her husband and what it means to carry a legacy like that. 

The legacy of the man who saved the universe-- the man who saved Peter and then died right in front of his eyes.

Peter knows that Pepper cares a great deal about young people, the way they are the future, and he knows this from experience. Because directly following Tony’s death she had put a lot of emotional _work_ into getting to know Peter better, bonding with him over things other than their shared grief (although that too, always that too), and making sure he knew that he was always welcome in her home, with her daughter, in the space that she and Tony had built for themselves during his absence. 

The relationship had been good for both of them, but in the past year or so Peter has been pretty well fucking up every relationship in his life, including this one. He looks at the SI booth in this moment where a teenage boy with a yellow backpack is gazing longingly at a pamphlet for an internship program that hadn’t existed back when Peter was using it as an excuse for Spider-Man related absences. He looks over his shoulder to where Harry is still slumped in his chair but at least talking to a kid this time. 

He looks down at the press pass hanging from a lanyard around his neck, feels the weight of his suit at the bottom of his backpack, finally remembers that he was supposed to have taken out the recycling this morning--

And suddenly he has to leave. 

He has to leave, has to leave, has to leave so he turns around before this whole event can bring forward any more of his copious amounts of failures and pushes his way back towards the exit, hoping all the while that he has enough on his memory card to avoid a lecture from Jameson. 

***

“Hey man, what’s up?” 

“Nothing just-- I’m on my way to Pour Over now,” Peter says into his earbuds, camera now safely inside his book bag as he tries to ignore the weight of it and his failure to finish even the _one_ task that was assigned to him today. He dipped out of the fair before he was supposed to, not like anything he did felt like it was _supposed_ to nowadays. 

“Oh cool man, yeah. I’m uh-- I’m gonna be a few minutes late but you should head right over there,” Ned says through the phone, Peter squinting as he walks forward. 

It wasn’t like Ned to be late to _anything_ \-- so firm was Mrs. Leeds’ insistence on punctuality that Peter was effectively-- but lovingly-- banned from having any kind of responsibility for a Leeds family function.

Not that Peter has been to any Leeds family functions in some time, much less anything that he wasn’t absolutely required to be at because of his job.

Or, in this instance, because it would lead to him having to face the flood of guilt he feels from being a terrible friend. 

For as much as he avoided May when she started to poke him towards being something more than the human equivalent of a trash can, Ned wasn’t really any better-- not missing the way he’d look at him when Peter would scare the shit out of him, tapping on his living room window and slipping in with a backpack to stay with him for a few days. 

These weekly lunches with Ned, at a coffee shop that was about as expensive as Peter could manage without feeling like a total piece of shit, was far below the metric of what Ned deserved.

But like everything in Peter’s life lately, it was the best he could do.

“You okay man?” Peter asks, Ned uncharacteristacally quiet on the other end as Peter walks down the sidewalk, seeing Pour Over in the distance.

“Yeah! Yeah totally, _totally_ fine. I’m just swamped at work, lots of stuff I’m working on but--”

“If you can’t meet up--” Peter starts to say, slowing his pace the closer he gets to Pour Over and already hating himself that he was thinking of how he’d be able to save a few bucks this week if Ned actually cancelled only for Ned to cut him off with a fervency that surprises him.

“ _No,_ no, I’m uh-- I’m good. You just-- get to Pour Over and I’ll be there like very, very soon.”

“Okay,” Peter says with a snort, taking the last few steps necessary before he’s at the front door of Pour Over, “you’re being weird, man.”

Whatever Ned says, Peter doesn’t hear it as he steps into the coffee shop-- his eyes scanning the place and landing on the one person he hadn’t expected to see glancing up to him with a surprised look on her face-- Ned’s caginess making entirely too much sense now as he sighs and walks up to her.

“Did Ned put you up to this?” He asks, hearing Ned stammer on the other end and seeing Michelle frown as she grips her mug tighter. 

It looked like green tea, Peter’s gut twisting at how much he had missed her, missed being in her presence and missed knowing how she took her tea as she stares up at him with a frown. 

“I’m gonna kill him,” she mutters, Peter realizing belatedly that both of them had been put up to this as Ned’s voice continues to echo over the phone.

“I’m not sorry. You two are being stupid and I’m tired of playing middle man. Figure it out.” A beat. “And call me later. Love you man.”

Ned hangs up without another word, Peter sighing again before taking an earbud out of his ear as Michelle goes to stand.

“You’re leaving?” Peter asks, Michelle just staring at him for a beat. 

“You don’t want to be here, you don’t want _me_ to be here,” she says, barely concealed hurt flashing across her face as she stands, “I’m gonna go before I say something that I regret.”

“Wait,” Peter says, surprising himself and seemingly surprising Michelle as he puts a hand out, “You’re here and Ned’s-- Ned’s too nosy for his own good but I um, it’s good to see you.” 

Michelle studies him for a beat, her face impassive even if Peter knows her too well to know that it’s just a front. Michelle Jones was many things but cold-hearted was not among them. 

It’d been six months since they’d broken up-- since _she_ had broken up with him-- but he could tell now just as he could then that it wasn’t a decision she particularly enjoyed making. 

Especially when in Peter’s eyes, it had been completely justified. 

“If you have a few minutes…” Peter says, motioning towards the table. 

He half-expects Michelle to sit back down, to have a conversation like they’d had so many times before. He’s not sure if he’s surprised or just sad when Michelle doesn’t make a move, staring at him with a look with entirely too much forced apathy to be genuine as she says, “I have a deadline. Ned said it was an emergency but if he’s not coming then…”

“Oh,” Peter says, clearing his throat as Michelle grabs the remainder of her mug of tea, downing it so that she can drop it off in the bin Pour Over usually kept to the side, “Okay, that-- yeah I--”

“Aren’t you supposed to be working the Brooklyn Science fair?” She asks, Peter blinking back up at her in surprise.

“How did-- you knew about that?”

Michelle shrugs, avoiding his gaze as she glances at her watch. “Harry texted me.”

Peter presses his lips together, wondering not for the first time just how much his friends talked about him behind his back. He was aware that there was a “Friends of Spider-Man” group text, though if Harry was officially part of it now it probably _wasn’t_ called that. 

He and Harry hadn’t been close enough friends for him to learn his secret, though it’s clear from the residual friendliness that him and Michelle kept in touch.

It bothers him more than it should. 

“Oh,” Peter says as carefully as he can manage, only for it to be clearly not careful enough for the way Michelle’s eyes narrow.

“He’s just worried about you,” she says with a sigh, Peter shifting his weight back and forth before blurting out words he should know better than to say.

“Are you?”

It’s an instant regret, especially for the way the hurt travels across her face before it turns to anger. 

“How do you— no,” she shakes her head, “I’m not doing this. I have a gallery to get ready for and I’m not doing this with you right now.”

She moves to walk past him only for Peter to block her path, Michelle glaring at him as he says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it then?” She asks point blank, like she always does— cutting straight to the point and clearing away the bullshit that Peter’s gotten entirely too good at throwing people. 

He should’ve known better than to think that Michelle Jones, even broken up, would accept his pitiful excuses. 

“I didn’t— I just meant—”

“Of course I care about you,” Michelle says softly, thinly veiled hurt in her tone as Peter grinds his teeth.

“MJ--”

“No,” she says, her voice thick until she clears it, gripping the mug in her hand tighter, straightening herself up as she stares into his eyes, “Of course I care about you, Peter. But I can’t keep watching you do this to yourself. You’re ducking out of _science fairs_ now? Seriously?”

She shakes her head, Peter not really having a suitable enough answer for himself much less than for her as she says, “I have to go.”

“MJ, wait—”

He gently raises a hand to rest on her arm, hearing her heart skip a beat despite how busy the coffee shop is from his touch in a way that still thrills him. 

Only for it all to come to a screeching halt when his phone buzzes in the same familiar pattern it always does when it’s Spider-Man related, loud enough that even Michelle can hear it as he brings his hand down and reaches into his pocket.

“You should go,” she says, her voice even and expression blank— Peter hating himself for looking at the alert but knowing he’d hate himself more if he didn’t check.

“Can we—”

“Tell Ned he owes me lunch,” she says, moving to walk away from him as Peter sighs.

She pauses, turning back to look at him before saying, “Be careful.”

 _I love you too,_ Peter thinks but doesn’t say, knowing Michelle well enough to decipher the meaning of her words when she turns to deposit her mug and walks out of Pour Over with purpose.

Peter’s left staring at her, much longer than he should as his phone buzzes— wondering where it all went wrong between them.

They’d survived being dusted for five years, survived a European trip from hell and a supposed identity reveal, survived the fall out and the questions and the eventual dismissal, survived the jump to college— give or take— only to now be almost five years since he first noticed, _really_ noticed Michelle Jones as she walked into home room after the Blip and to now be transfixed at watching her leave. 

Only to sigh as he slips his phone back in his pocket and moves towards the door to go change.

Peter knows _exactly_ what went wrong between the two of them— nothing to do with MJ.

And everything to do with him. 

***

“Spider-Man, are you okay?”

“Never better kid,” Peter says, as he throws up finger-guns, swaying slightly as he tries to stay still for the picture.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” a voice says next to him, Peter glancing up and seeing what he can only assume is the kid’s mom frowning at him. She grabs at her child who is whining that they didn’t get a good enough picture, only to walk towards another woman with another equally disappointed frown who takes the other hand of the kid.

“Definitely am, ma’am,” Peter calls out, groaning as he hoists himself up from his squat. Only to move too fast, letting out a short _oof_ as he falls flat on his face.

It’s a credit to New Yorkers that they ignore the sprawled out Spider-Man on his face, drunk out of his mind and wearing a suit that was several stages past _worn_. Maybe they thought he was just a drunk imposter, something that would work out in his favor since Pepper already had enough on her plate than having to retroactively run PR for a washed-up superhero college drop out.

Not that anyone else knew that Peter was such a failure in his personal life. He groans again, moving to shift up into a seated position as people continue to walk past him, wondering for a beat if he’s truly reached rock bottom or if there were still some feet left to fall. 

He doesn’t really get a chance to dwell more on it when he hears the screams of someone in the distance, manicacal laughter that sounds way too fucking _cheery_ for how exhausted, drunk and yet somehow already hungover Peter’s feeling.

“Great. Just great, can’t even fucking wallow in _peace_ for five damn minutes,” Peter says, mostly to himself as he hoists himself up off the dirty sidewalk, sending a hand out and swinging himself into the air.

The change in direction is quick and a little too fast, feeling as if he’s gonna hurl for three seconds before it passes as he swings towards where the sound is. 

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Peter mutters when he sees the source of the sound, an honest to God _wizard_ flying around in a purple haze.

Or at least it looks like a wizard, decked out in a robe that looks like it came from Party City and enough black eyeliner to look like a raccoon as they levitated themselves up in the air-- laughing in glee as they yelled out, “Spider-Man!”

“The one and only,” Peter mutters to himself, avoiding a shot of whatever purple shit that’s coming out of the guy’s hands, “If you wanted to meet up, I got an open calendar. Free and clear, Houdini.”

“ _Who_?” The man asks, Peter scoffing before just _barely_ missing yet another shot of purple laser looking shit that Peter can’t tell if it’s real or he’s just too drunk to really understand what the hell he’s seeing.

“Dude, come _on,_ ” Peter says, shooting a web out to swing in the opposite direction before sending a few taser webs towards the guy-- the man deflecting one before getting hit with another. He spasms a few times before starting to fall down to the ground, hearing the sharp inhale of the crowd that had gathered before Peter moves into action-- switching the webs to the regular version and creating a bit of a cushion before the guy fell. 

“Maybe some time with a _real_ wizard will give you a better perspective on things,” Peter says to the man who looks a little dazed, only to glare back at Peter when he lands next to him.

“You’ll see Spider-Man! You’ll see if--” The man is immediately muffled as Peter sends a web over his mouth, the man’s hands still wiggling only for something just as purple and terribly gaudy to fall out of the guy’s pocket.

“Ooh what’s this? Another Party City souvenir?” Peter jokes, the man’s eyebrows furrowing as he yells something at him-- muffled from the web as Peter looks at it.

It kind of reminds him of what the glowy thingy had looked like when he was back in high school, his spider senses just barely itching in the back of his neck. It’s instincts he tacitly ignores, shoving the little rock in his pocket before directing Karen to call for Strange for clean up.

“Are you sure you don’t wish to stay, Peter?” Karen’s voice chimes in, Peter shaking his head in response only to take a beat too long to remember that Karen was in fact an AI and could not read his facial cues.

“Nah,” Peter says, blinking a few times and hoping the quick swing will sober him up, “Gotta get to May’s before five. Cooking dinner for her and it would probably suck if my apology dinner didn’t happen because I was playing phone tag with a dude who can’t be bothered to show up half the time.”

He swings away from the purple wizard guy, asking Karen to touch base with Wong for good measure before he changes his trajectory back to May’s apartment. 

***

Dinner turns out slightly better than Peter hoped, something he’d feel a lot more proud of had it not been for the reason.

Peter—historically— was a shitty cook. Ned had a knack for it and Michelle had a solid five meals she could whip out in rotation but Peter was abysmal at best. 

It’d been a joke, before Peter had run his life into the ground, before Michelle had broken up with him and they still joked about these things, that he made up for his shitty cooking in other ways. 

Six months of being broken up and even longer of living as a step above a mooch in May’s apartment, Peter had decidedly gotten better at the whole cooking thing.

The pasta was still a little gummy and the salad was a step beyond _tossed_ than it should be but it tasted good and May didn’t seem to have any complaints, dutifully eating the portions Peter had given her as he chattered on aimlessly. 

Peter didn’t have anything remotely interesting to talk about but it was better than the silence that would fall between them anytime he let them sit quietly for two long. Silence felt like a gap, silence allowed for an opportunity for questions.

Silence reminded him that for as much as May loved him, that the fact that they had so little _new_ things to talk about, made him feel even more like a failure. 

Peter is actively working to combat said silence as they do the dishes, yammering on about some story he saw about a gang of green pigeons that had been spotted across the city when May cuts in— catching him off guard as she asks, “Peter, are you happy?”

“I’m— uh, am I what?” He asks, looking over to her as she dries the plate she ate from, focused on it as she repeats the question.

“Are you happy?”

“Well,” Peter says with a snort, the prickly feeling of unease in the back of his throat having less to do with danger and more at the bluntness of a woman who knows him better than he probably knows himself, “I mean sure, yeah. I’m happy. I got a job and a place to live and—”

“You should know by now that things don’t make you happy,” May says, Peter feeling his stomach churn as she looks at him over her glasses. 

“You’re not happy,” she says definitively, not as a question but more of a statement as she continues, “And I’m not sure what else I can do to help you.”

“Are you kicking me out?” Peter asks, his voice a lot softer and tinged with a lot more hurt he intended as May frowns, putting the dried plate down and turning to him.

“ _Why_ would you ever think that? Peter—”

“It’s okay,” Peter cuts in, focusing on the faucet as he scrubs his plate harder— remembering to control his absurd physical strength, “if you want to, I mean. I know I deserve it and you’ve— you’ve let me stay here a _lot_ longer than I probably should have but—“

May puts a hand to his shoulder, Peter blinking back tears as he looks back at her— only to feel worse when he sees the hurt expression on her face.

“Peter, _why_ would you ever think that I’d kick you out? I love you, kiddo. We’re a team. Always,” she says, Peter feeling a prickle of hot shame rolling around his spine— remembering the first time May had said those words, shivering and wrapped in a shock blanket after he watched the only man he’s known as a father die right in front of him.

She must remember it too, upturning the corner of her mouth before bringing a hand to his face as she says, “You’re going through a rough patch, but that’s just it. You’re _going_.”

“I’ve fucked up, May,” Peter says with a huff, water still going on in the background, “I can’t— even Spider-Man is a total fuck up these days.”

May frowns, bringing her hand down to turn the water off at the sink before looking at Peter— leveling her gaze in a way that makes him feel like he’s in high school all over again.

“That, right there, is your biggest problem.”

“Wait what?” Peter asks, May sighing as she shakes her head.

“You are not just Spider-Man. You base your whole life on how that’s going—”

“May—”

“And you can’t, you _can’t_ keep doing that, Peter,” she says definitively, firmly, making Peter feel a lot younger than he is.

“You were Peter Parker long before Spider-Man ever came along and you’ll be Peter Parker long after Spider-Man is gone,” she says, Peter ignoring the itch in the back of his throat as he holds her gaze— a quiet whisper in the back of his mind that it was an all too real possibility that the end of Spider-Man _would_ be the end of Peter Parker.

Peter says instead, “I don’t even know who I am without it. I can’t— I can’t give it up, May.”

“I’m not saying you have to,” she says, exhaustion emanating from her and a recognition in her eyes that Peter feels deep in his bones— that she too feared what his end would be.

“But you need to figure out how you’re going to continue to do this. Figure out what kind of person you want to be.” 

_Happy,_ Peter thinks but doesn’t say, only for May to confirm his own fears as she says, “Because I don’t think you’re him right now.”

***

Logically, Peter knows he should be doing some soul searching— perched on the roof of his apartment, suit in hand and barely a hint of restraint at the chance that someone could see him.

Emotionally, Peter doesn’t give a fuck— five steps past tipsy and straight into full out drunk as he blearily stares at the suit, running over it with his fingers.

If Peter was sober, he’d recognize he was being stupid— being drunk on the rooftop, being drunk on the rooftop _with his suit in hand_ , being drunk on the rooftop with his suit in hand and half a mind to go out on patrol.

If Peter was sober, he’d recognize that he’s been doing the superhero thing for almost a decade and yet it feels much, _much_ longer than that— that it was okay to feel a little overwhelmed and that he should, as literally anyone in his life told him to, take some breaks. 

If Peter was sober, he’d know he’s been hard on himself— that he’s fucked up but isn’t a fuck up.

Peter, however, is not sober. 

“You’re my fucking problem. Always— always been a pr’blem,” he slurs, only to frown as he comes across something in the pocket.

He reaches for it, frown deepening as he pulls out some glowy purple thing, his alcohol ridden brain failing to remember where it came from as he drops the suit. 

“What the hell…” Peter says, looking at it over in his hand.

If Peter was sober, he’d remember he should contact Strange or Wong or literally anyone else about this.

If Peter was sober, he’d probably think better of shaking the glowy looking rock or pinching at its sides.

Peter, however, is not sober. 

He does just that, spider sense tingling in the background when the glowy thing turns bright— white hot light out of nowhere.

“Oh shit,” Peter mutters, going to drop it only to feel an immediate pulling sensation in his gut— not even sure if it’s fallen from his hand.

Peter feels a blinding pain, like he’s being pulled apart into a thousand pieces.

And then nothing at all.

  
  


***

On a probably Saturday, probably afternoon in what feels like it’s probably Summer, Peter Parker wakes up with a snort. 

He’s laying down but he’s definitely not in bed, which wouldn’t be all that abnormal these days except he’s definitely not on a couch either from the way he can feel wood grain digging into his cheek and threatening to give him a splinter or seven. 

The sun is beating down on him and Peter can feel the beginnings of a sunburn on the back of his neck, which means he’s been here for at least long enough for that to happen. His stomach is roiling and his teeth taste like actual, literal garbage and as he cracks open an eye and pushes himself up with the palms of his hands his head spins. 

Something’s not right inside his body, but quite frankly he’s had worse hangovers so his main focus for the moment has got to be figuring out why the hell he’s outside and… 

Beside a lake?

Peter runs a hand over his face, digs two fingers into his eye sockets, and when he opens them again, blinks away the spots in his vision to confirm that, yes, he is on a bench between the treeline of a forest and a large, still lake. 

It’s quite frankly a new level of fucked up, a new step towards rock bottom, if he’s waking up in places he doesn’t recognize with no memory of how he got there in the first place, and he just slumps back in the bench for a moment to let that sink in before he even considers trying to problem solve. 

He doesn’t have any of his Spider-Man gear, but he also isn’t currently locked up, so this is probably an issue of his first truly embarrassing blackout and not of, say, kidnapping, but a pat to his pockets reveals he is also without a phone or wallet. 

So not a much better situation to be in, as far as Peter’s concerned. 

He takes a deep breath, as much to settle his nausea as to get his bearings. The sun glints off the water and full, green leaves rustle softly in a faint breeze and it’s… actually not entirely unfamiliar. 

Why, exactly, is it not entirely unfamiliar? 

His balance is off as he tries to stand, like when you step in a puddle that’s deeper than expected, except he’s on solid ground, even looks down and stomps his foot a couple of times to double check. 

The treeline behind him continues in both directions, but as Peter turns around, he notices a dirt trail cutting through the forest and it’s so not entirely unfamiliar but he can’t place _why._ Why can’t he place why? 

With few options and a restless need to figure out what the fuck he’s gotten himself into, Peter starts down the path at a careful, methodical pace. He can’t hear anything that would be out of the ordinary for a forest by the lake, and he can’t see or smell anything of that sort either, even when he tunes in to his super senses and really makes a go at it. 

He feels like he’s wandering as he arbitrarily chooses a path winding through the trees and picking forks in the road based on an instinct he only trusts about half the time these days until he sees a break in the forestry up ahead of him and slows down. 

Peter worries for a moment that he’s going to have to fight his way out of something, that this has all been a fun game for some supervillain with a vendetta, but as he approaches the edge of the forest and peeks out around the trees, all of his wild (if not entirely unlikely with the nature of his life) theories go flying out the window. 

The lakehouse. 

Of course the fucking lakehouse, Parker, you woke up beside a _lake._

Peter lets out a breath of tension, because although he still has no idea how he got here or why he came, he at the very least knows _where_ he is. It’s still humiliating and he still kind of wants to puke but even if it’s been a while since he last visited, Peter knows he’s welcome here, no matter how much he feels like he probably shouldn’t be. 

Mostly, he pauses there at the edge of the treeline because he needs to have a plan before he knocks on the door and scares the living daylights out of Pepper with what he’s sure is a pretty disastrous appearance and no viable excuse for showing up. 

He considers his excuses, levels his shoulders so as to seem reasonably put together, and is about to step out onto the lawn when a twig behind him snaps. 

“Stop right there. Put your hands up and turn around slowly. You know exactly who I am and exactly what I can do to you.”

Peter freezes, because the fact of the matter is he _doesn’t_ know who this man is, despite the way his brain is screaming at him that he does. Years of only hearing that voice on recordings and he still hasn’t forgotten what it sounds like, but it’s not _possible._

It’s simply not possible and Peter is already disoriented beyond belief and he doesn’t know how he got here and who is behind him and _how are they replicating that voice--_

“I said _hands up!”_

Peter, stuck somewhere between shock and terror for the way he thought he had a grasp of the situation but now realizes he very much does not, keeps his hands at his sides and whips his head around in direct opposition to what he’s been ordered to do. 

It’s not possible, not possible, _not possible._

Dark hair, greying at the sides; beard, neatly trimmed; blue glow, filtered through the fabric of a t-shirt; gauntlet, charged and pointing directly at Peter’s head. 

Peter watches his face fall, watches the armored hand falter, watches his breath hitch and still in his chest, and Peter’s going to puke. He’s definitely going to puke this time, there’s no question of it in his mind-- _not possible not possible not possible._

_“Pete?”_

It’s a breath of a thing, hopeful and scared and _loud_ in Peter’s ringing ears. Because put all together, the location and the voice and the face, it feels like his feet have been sucked in by the earth and his lungs have been entirely removed from his body. 

He’s looking at a dead man. 

“Might be time to stop drinking, Parker,” he mutters to himself. 

He’s looking at Tony Stark. 


	2. it’s a miracle (that you’re here at all)

Peter Parker lost his parents when he was seven years old. 

He doesn’t remember a lot from how he reacted to the news, or even how May and Ben had passed along such information to the child that had been left in their care until a week from forever. 

Presumably, it had been a difficult thing to explain to a seven years old, especially since it came out of nowhere, especially since he had already been prepared to not see them for a few days (which, to a child equates to a couple of months, a couple of imagined lifetimes with his friends at recess). Presumably it had been near impossible, but Peter doesn’t remember that. 

He doesn’t remember any of it, except for a trip one Sunday afternoon to the grocery store with Ben. They were in the frozen foods section, getting pizza and ice cream because although Peter can’t remember it now, he was having a lot of trouble adjusting at the time and May and Ben were not above bribing him with junk food to make him feel a little more at home. 

So, they were in the frozen food section, and Peter was supposed to keep his hand on the cart, so when he saw a familiar face down the way in front of the milk, he grabbed at Ben’s jacket and  _ tugged _ instead of running away like he often got in trouble for.

“Uncle Ben-- Uncle  _ Ben!” _ he had insisted to get his uncle’s attention, only dropping the bomb of what he said next once he did.  _ “Look, Mommy came back!” _

Ben had gone pale as a ghost, and they had ultimately had to leave their cart behind while he carried a sobbing, screaming child out of the store because Peter refused, refused, refused to believe that the woman buying milk was anyone other than his mother. 

But Peter’s not seven anymore. He knows better now. 

***

Tony Stark, or something that looks like Tony Stark, takes a step towards him, and so Peter stumbles backwards with a hand up. 

“If you’re a Skrull, you gotta change your face now,” Peter says, clearing his throat when he realizes he doesn’t sound nearly as authoritative as he was hoping. 

“What?” Tony’s brow furrows and he still has the gauntlet on his hand but it’s pointed at the ground now instead of at Peter. 

“This is fucked up, you know?” Peter laughs uncomfortably. “To pick that face? I’m not gonna let you--”

“--I’m not a Skrull--”

“--go in there and fucking--”

“--Are  _ you _ a Skrull--”

“--torment that man’s daughter and his-- fucking  _ widow.” _

Now it’s Tony’s turn to freeze, visibly reeling in a way that’s so unlike the younger, cockier man that Peter remembers. 

“Oh my  _ God,” _ Tony breathes, and it’s so excruciating, both the tone of his voice and the way it makes Peter feel, so he takes another step backwards, almost stumbling on a clump of dirt in the grass. 

Alcohol isn’t a hallucinogen, Peter reminds himself, so why does this feel so deeply unreal? 

“I can’t--” Peter shakes his head. “I can’t do this. I can’t do it--”

“Two outcomes,” Tony is talking to himself but he’s also talking to Peter. “Two timelines-- two--  _ fucking two.” _

“Okay,” Peter laughs a little hysterically. “I’m not-- in a place where I can fucking-- handle this--”

Tony breathes out unsteadily, takes another step forward, “ _ Peter.” _

“Yeah, that’s my name,” Peter steps out of his reach again. “What’s fucking  _ yours?” _

He’s actually, finally come unhinged and is about to just let loose and lean into it when a door swings open behind him and he hears a worried--

“Tony? What’s going on?” 

Peter turns around just as Pepper makes it to the bottom of the front porch steps, where she immediately goes white as a sheet and grabs ahold of the railing, as though needing to physically keep herself upright. 

“Pep, I don’t know what’s going on,” Peter takes a couple of steps towards her. “But I’m gonna handle it. Just go call Rhodey and I’ll take care of it until he gets here.”

Pepper stares at him, gobsmacked and maybe a little afraid, and then looks to Tony and back again. 

“Who are you?” she asks, jaw held tight as though to combat saying more than she wants to say. 

“I’m--” Peter balks, knowing his face is a mask of utter confusion as he meets her disbelieving gaze. “Pepper, I know I haven’t visited in a few months, but…”

“Tony,” she turns back to the man that, when Peter turns to follow her eye line, he realizes has slowly moved closer, as though cornering a frightened animal. “He’s gotten  _ older _ .” 

Peter frowns because she’s talking to  _ Tony. _ She’s talking to the dead guy as though Peter is the one that’s out of place in the scenario, and every time her eyes land on him she looks as though she might burst into tears. 

There’s something in one of the darker corners of Peter’s ill treated and misused mind that’s trying to explain the whole thing to him, trying to pull up memories five years gone and make this all make sense, but every time they get close to putting together one full, coherent thought, Peter catches sight of Tony’s face again and has to put a lot of energy into not falling flat on his face. 

“I’m gonna need someone to explain to me what’s going on here,” Peter implores, because he’s feeling more and more with each passing second that he’s missing something that the other two already understand. 

“How about we just go inside,” Tony speaks slowly, cranes his neck slightly to try and get Peter to look him in the eye. “And we can talk about it--”

“No, I--” Peter shakes his head adamantly. “You’re-- You’re not  _ possible.” _

“Take a breath,” Tony demands gently, in the way demands are gentle from kindergarten teachers and good fathers. “We’ll get you some water, and we’ll talk about it.”

“I don’t want a glass of water!” Peter is on the verge of exploding, and he hates being this person in front of Pepper, but the world is turning to sand between his fingertips and he just-- “I want to know how the hell you’re  _ here.” _

Tony takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly in an intentional act of patience. 

“I think it’s more how  _ you’re  _ here _ , _ bud,” he says. “Stephen Strange-- You know Stephen Strange?”

Peter looks at him with a near-scowl. “Yes, I know Strange,” he snaps, because the patience, the level-headedness is, quite frankly, grating.

“Did he ever explain the two winning timelines to you?” Tony continued, unperturbed, or maybe just caught up in his own perception of this moment. “After Thanos?”

“He explained a lot of shit after Thanos,” Peter says. The sun is hot on his neck and he is sweating, he is burning. “Went on about it for hours and managed to be infuriatingly vague the whole fucking time.” 

“Yeah,” Tony chuckles and it manages to sound amused and off-kilter and hopeful all at once. “He has a habit of that.” 

“So you’re saying…” Peter runs a hand over his face, letting out a huff of frustrated air. “You’re saying that you’re from another timeline?”

“I’m saying  _ you’re _ from another timeline,” Tony tells him, but Peter’s head is still spinning and he really can’t tell if he’s hungover or still drunk or something else entirely. “Strange never said what happened to make us win where you’re from, but I-- I think I can figure it out from the way you’re looking at me like that.” 

Peter lifts a hand to the nape of his neck, digs his fingers into the matted curls of his hair and pulls at the root until it hurts as he looks between Pepper and Tony--  _ Pepper and Tony _ \-- with a fierce anxiety that he’s been able to bury under the heaviness of other things in recent months and years. 

Not anymore though. Not while Tony is looking at him like he personally performed a miracle. 

“Okay-- Uh,” he presses his lips together tight and makes a sound of discontent at the back of his throat, stepping away yet again when it feels like Tony is going to move closer. “Okay. Okay. But if what happened where I’m from didn’t happen here--”

“Can we please sit down before we talk about--”

“Then how is Thanos gone-- how is-- how did you beat him and, and, and--”  _ survive it.  _

The thing is part of Peter knows already, but he can’t quite stomach it. Can’t quite cope with the fact that there’s a world-- that he’s  _ standing  _ in a world where Thanos is gone and Tony Stark is alive and both of those things are true at the same time. 

A world that proves that was an option all along. 

“Kid--” Peter grimaces at the moniker, but Tony continues with methodical care. “I didn’t beat Thanos here… You did.” 

An involuntary, near-whimper of sound hums at the bottom of Peter’s vocal cords. 

Tony didn’t stop Thanos. Tony didn’t snap.  _ Peter _ did those things and Peter saved the world and Peter-- Well, that means that Peter died. 

Peter died. He died and Tony lived. He died, he died, he  _ died-- _

“Peter?” Pepper speaks up from the porch steps, where she still grips the hand rail for dear life. 

He looks up at her, because apparently for a minute there he was just staring at his own shoes, muddied by a walk in the woods and worn by age. Peter looks up at her though, at this woman who he’s only truly known as a widow, a single mother, a force of nature in the face of the unimaginable. 

And he sees that her worry is not for herself in this moment, that her unsteadiness is not from a place of fear or loss or overwhelming grief. Because this woman has survived a lot, yes, but she still has her husband. 

Because Peter Parker saved him. 

Peter clears his throat. 

“Do you think I could get a cup of coffee?” 

  
***

  
  


The house is the same, and also not. 

They have the same couch in the living room, Peter notices as they walk past, and they have the same curtains over the windows in the kitchen. When Pepper pours him a cup of coffee, Peter recognizes the mug and when he sits down at the table it’s the same seat he usually chooses, facing the sink and windows with his back to the rest of the open floor plan home. 

But the grief in the house Peter knows from back home is gone. There are touches of Tony everywhere, not out of a desire to remember him, but because Tony has personally  _ left _ them there in casual acts of everyday humanity. 

A pair of glasses on the windowsill, a tablet on the kitchen island, a couple different pairs of shoes by the front door. 

No, the grief for Tony Stark is absent in this house, replaced by something that Peter notices gradually during the beat of silence as they all get settled at the table. 

A framed picture on a shelf over the sink, a spider emblem, seemingly plucked straight off of Peter’s suit, in a shadowbox hanging over the stairs. 

The mere way that Tony hasn’t taken his eyes off of Peter since he turned around on the lawn outside. 

“Is Morgan here?” Peter blurts out the moment the thought crosses his mind, because he saw a photograph of her on the wall on the way in, but usually when he came by she was halfway down the steps by the time he was making his way up the porch. 

“She’s upstairs,” Pepper explains. “Reading. Probably doesn’t even know we have a-- visitor.” 

“She doesn’t know me here,” Peter says to his hands where they’re wrapped around a hot mug of coffee, knee bouncing restlessly underneath the table. 

“We’ll explain it to her,” Tony assures him, but Peter doesn’t feel all that assured. 

Instead he laughs bitterly and lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, aware he looks on the brink of a breakdown even as he says, “Mind explaining it to me too, while you’re at it?” 

“I’ll answer any questions you have,” Tony tells him without hesitation. “As best I can, anyway.” 

Peter looks at his face, trying to determine his level of honesty, or just how forthcoming he plans to be, but doesn’t find any of the faltering equivocation that he remembers from his Tony. Because in high school, Peter had always had a lot of questions, and when given the opportunity to work with Tony in his lab, he had taken advantage of the chance to ask as many of them as possible. 

Back then, in Peter’s real life rather than this confusing imitation, Tony had been eager to talk to Peter about science and mathematics and engineering until the metaphorical cows came home, but he had balked at personal questions. He had side-stepped and ducked and danced around anything that might have forced him into a conversation about his father or Steve Rogers or why he’d had a black eye on their trip home from Germany. 

Which is why Peter is skeptical. Because the questions he has are about another battle that this Tony has survived, and they’re not exactly impersonal in nature. 

“So. Here, I--” Peter falters. “Well, this Peter. Your Peter. He used the gauntlet during the battle at the Compound?” 

“Yes,” Tony nodded. 

“And he, um, he was gone for-- for five years before that?” 

“He was,” Tony acquiesces to Peter’s separation of himself from this other Peter via pronoun usage. 

“So, you haven’t seen--” Peter cuts himself off with a frown. “It’s been ten years?” he simplifies.

Tony lets out a breath. “I got to see him that day,” he explains. “Got to talk to him for a minute before it all went to shit but-- Yes. Yeah, essentially. Ten years.”

Peter isn’t sure how to feel about that, isn’t sure how he  _ does _ feel except a little baffled that it’s been half the time for him. Maybe that’s why Tony’s a bit more settled in his body than Peter, or maybe Tony Stark just always has and always will be the stronger man. In any timeline. 

“Who else did you lose?” Peter asks, blunt in the way people in their profession have to ask such a question.

Peter’s almost grateful that this, finally, seems to knock some of Tony’s stability off-center. His gaze drops briefly and he watches Pepper lay a hand on Tony’s knee. She’s been quiet during this conversation, quieter than he knows her to be. 

But then again, this Pepper doesn’t know him. She knows Tony’s memories of him, knows him in an adjacent sort of way, but hasn’t watched him grow from the sixteen-year-old kid who failed to save her husband into the spiraling twenty-one-year-old with a semi-justifiable drinking problem. 

“Natasha,” Tony answers Peter’s question. “Nat-- We-- We lost Nat when we went back to get the stones.”

Peter nods, working his jaw. “Yeah,” he breathes, knowing that with the way it all played out his death wouldn’t have saved her, but having had a moment of hope there nonetheless. 

“How did this happen?” Peter asks, when neither of the adults in the room seem to know how to continue the conversation. 

“Not a clue,” Tony responds simply. 

“Okay,” a heavy breath. “We should probably figure that out, though.” 

Tony studies him for a beat and Pepper clutches her hands together on the top of the table in a way that Peter recognizes. Stress. Confusion. General Peter Parker related emotions. 

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Tony questions carefully. “Before you woke up here?” 

Peter desperately wants to bury his face in his hands and scream but settles for scratching at his forehead in a way that blocks most of his furrowed shame from view. Because the problem is the hours leading up to awaking on a bench by a lake are terribly fuzzy in a terribly recognizable way. 

He remembers dinner with May and he remembers the way it made him feel. He remembers being that particular brand of sad that made him want to drink himself into oblivion and he remembers bending to that whim like a fucking sapling in a storm. 

“It’s-- Uh,” Peter gives in and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It’s in bits and pieces at the moment.” 

Tony’s frowning slightly when Peter glances at his face briefly before returning his gaze to the more comfortable sight of his quickly diminishing cup of coffee. 

“Is that from the-- y’know-- multidimensional travel of it all?” 

Peter snorts. “That or the whiskey,” he mutters before he can censor himself. The disorientation of the moment is really fucking with his self filter and he sincerely does not appreciate it one bit. 

He can  _ feel _ the look that Tony and Pepper share even without looking up, because it’s a look that’s become unbearably commonplace in his everyday life. It’s a look of equal parts disapproval and concern, but in this case there’s the fun added ingredient of  _ surprise. _

Peter guesses that they never really considered the sixteen-year-old martyr they had once known might have been a bit of a deadbeat in another life. 

“Okay,” Tony says, but it sounds a lot like  _ we’ll tackle that later. _ “We’ll figure it out.”

“We can call Stephen,” Pepper finally chimes in, now that there’s a problem she feels more suited to solve. “See what he has to say about the whole thing.”

Tony seems relatively dissatisfied with this plan for whatever reason, but he nods anyway and says, “Yeah. Yeah, we can do that.”

“How are you not freaking out about this?” Peter levels Tony with the question and all of the weight of it indiscriminately. “How are you-- I mean, not  _ freaking out _ about this?”

Tony’s face shifts between at least half a dozen emotions so quickly that Peter’s short-circuiting brain doesn’t have a single hope of naming them, but it lands on awe. 

It lands on an unfamiliar softness that forces Peter to keep looking at it, no matter how much he wishes to avert his gaze. 

“You know,” Tony says with a slight shake of his head. “I’ve spent a lot of years imagining what you would-- I dunno-- look like? Sound like? If you had the chance to grow up,” he exhales a quiet laugh. “Didn’t think I’d get to test my theories though.” 

Peter’s immediate thought, which he has to clamp down on his jaw to keep from spilling out into that immaculate, lived-in kitchen, is in wanting to know every miniscule detail of what these theories entailed. He wants to know because he wants to be able to have a definitive checklist for all of the ways in which he’s failed. 

Because he’s a masochist and because he’s already dead. 

In looking away from Tony though, in dodging that gaze, Peter’s eyes only fall on the framed picture above the sink. He remembers taking that picture, which is strange because technically he didn’t. He remembers the internship certificate and he remembers only putting bunny ears behind Tony’s head because Tony had refused to drop his. 

“Could I-- Uh,” he abruptly pushes his seat back with a discordant squeak of the chair against the floor. “Restroom?” he finishes lamely. 

Pepper stands. “There’s an en suite in the guest room upstairs. I can show you--”

“I-- Um. I know-- where it is,” Peter flounders, not trying to be rude but managing it despite himself because he just really needs to step away. Just for a minute, just for long enough to catch a full breath. 

“Of course,” Pepper says with something like realization. “I guess that’s your room where you’re from. It was always-- supposed to be.” 

Peter crumples. Posture and face and soul. 

“And it still can be, kid. Obviously,” Tony chimes in hurriedly, taking Peter’s sudden shift towards despair in what is very much the wrong way. “You can stay here until we figure this all out. As long as it takes, Pete. You’re-- you’re always welcome.”

Peter nods once, tersely, just to prove that he heard what’s been said. 

“I’ll be right back,” he blurts before turning and fleeing the kitchen, but he thinks they all know that’s a lie. 

He finds the room that is certainly still a guest room where he’s from with the ease of muscle memory and closes the door behind him, making sure not to focus on his enhanced hearing because there’s no way they’re not talking about him. 

He can’t help thinking about Morgan, just down the hall, probably getting a convoluted explanation from her parents about the strange man in their house. Part of Peter wants to climb out the window and run away, but part of him knows he doesn’t have a car and part of him knows he can’t just wander around as a dead man. 

Can’t track down May because May has already mourned him, can’t do anything but sit in this guest room until he’s able to force himself to go back downstairs for more answers he isn’t even sure he wants. 

His eyes track across the room. The curtains are different up here, as is the comforter, and he doesn’t know why that matters but it does. 

There’s also a spare tablet on the desk, plugged into the wall and taunting him with its inevitable knowledge. 

But Peter’s a masochist, so he grabs it and sits down on the edge of the bed and turns it on before he can consider any pros or cons. 

He navigates to a web browser. He types in  _ Spider-Man _ . 

He immediately chokes on nothing and coughs raggedly into his fist at what he sees. 

_ Boy Savior: The Legacy of Peter Parker, Five Years Later _

_ Spider-Man Memorial Erected in Forest Hills, Queens  _

_ Local Hero Turned Universal Savior _

_ Opinion: The Avengers and Responsibility for Underage Heroes _

They know his name. They know his  _ face. _ They know his school record and his AcaDec wins and the address of the apartment where he’d grown up (there’s a plaque outside the building now, that cheap, mess of a place that he and May had turned into a warm home). 

Worst of all, though, is that they mourn him. They mourn him like the hero that Peter hasn’t felt like in years, but he supposes he never  _ was _ this hero. The one who made the sacrifice play. 

An endless amount of time later, he has a hand over his mouth, scrolling through an article about a public elementary school in Queens that dedicated a day to Spider-Man every year when the door to his room swings open unapologetically. 

His head shoots up and he almost throws the tablet across the room in his restlessness, but he freezes when he sees not Tony or Pepper standing in the doorway, but Morgan. 

“Hi,” she says, eyes raking over him with a level of scrutiny he’s used to from most of the women in his life, but not her. 

It’s different in the other direction from the way Tony has been looking at him, and it makes Peter stutter when he replies with a simple, “Hey.” 

“Dad said you’re Peter,” she says flatly, in the way that nine-year-olds can be blunt without meaning to be. Although, looking at her and the way she’s very visibly skeptical of him, he wonders whether or not it  _ is  _ unintentional. 

“Um. Yeah,” Peter responds, a little at a loss for words. 

She tilts her head to the side, really looks him over in a way that makes him feel a little too seen. 

“You don’t look like the pictures,” is what comes out when she seems to reach a conclusion. 

A startled laugh forces its way out of Peter’s chest, one that just makes Morgan frown deeper at him. 

“No,” he says, glib and bitter and honest. “I don’t.” 

Morgan crosses her arms over her chest, the picture of obstinate, and Peter wants to climb out the window all over again. Or better yet, to have never stumbled in and disrupted this incomparable take on a nuclear family. 

(He can’t think too hard about the  _ how _ of it yet, the  _ why now, _ the  _ why him, _ of it. Because the  _ it _ alone is too much to digest.)

“Morgan?” 

Peter hears Tony coming down the hall even before he appears behind his daughter with an exasperated look on his face. 

“I told you to leave him be, you snoop,” he says, placing a gentle hand on top of her head and using it to turn her around to face him. 

“Sorry,” she replies unapologetically. 

Tony just sighs. “Go help Mom with dinner, okay?” 

Morgan nods, leaving Peter with one last curious glance over her shoulder and yelling something about  _ Mom, he doesn’t  _ look _ like Spider-Man _ as she trundles down the stairs, making Tony wince. 

“Sorry about that,” he says, but Peter just shrugs. 

“She’s not the first one to notice,” he says truthfully, thinking about a selfie on the sidewalk and  _ you should be ashamed of yourself. _

Tony looks like he wants to follow up on that comment, the same way he has every time Peter says something remotely concerning, but the thing about their situation is that despite knowing each other they very much don’t  _ know  _ each other, and maybe those aren’t the kinds of conversations they’re allowed to have. 

Allowed by whom, Peter isn’t sure, but it feels like there are rules here that neither of them have parsed out quite yet. They have time, though, if Peter’s gut and his knowledge of the complexity of the multiverse means anything. 

When Tony finally breaks the silence, he only seconds this understanding of their situation. 

“So,” Tony begins, tapping his fingers absentmindedly against his thigh, “looks like you might be here for awhile.”

“Looks like it,” Peter replies, head still reeling from the sheer amount of information that he’s had to absorb in the past few hours. It was a  _ lot _ to put it mildly, Peter still feeling a little hungover even if the alcohol in his system was long absorbed by now and from the implications that he has no idea how he got here.

Multi-dimensional travel was a bitch. 

“You uh, you’re all settled then. Everything okay?” Tony asks, Peter still torn between staring at the man in front of him and desperately wanting to get as far away as possible.

Tony, for his part, looks just as uncomfortable— or not uncomfortable,  _ awkward _ . It’s disorienting for Peter, talking to a dead man sure but for  _ Iron Man _ to look out of place.

The Tony he remembered was quick-witted, a sharp tongue and a killer sense of humor— any fond memories Peter has of the not nearly as frequent as he would’ve liked lab times back in high school being tinged with a frenetic kind of energy. 

This Tony was more subdued, or maybe he was just cautious— probably just as disoriented as Peter feels as he looks into the eyes of someone who should be a dead man and seeing the same expression mirrored back at him.

“Yep, yeah, I’m—” Peter clicks his tongue, “solid.”

“Good, that’s— that’s good,” Tony says quietly, folding his arms together.

The silence that falls between them is thick, heavy with a thousand things they clearly want to ask each other but don’t dare to— not yet, not when they both seem to be adjusting to the fact that in their respective universes, the other is dead.

“Well,” Tony says, unfurling his hands and clapping them together, “dinner’s at five. I’ll uh, I’ll leave you to it then.”

“‘Kay,” Peter replies, Tony’s words indicating that he’s leaving but staying rooted in the same spot— taking a beat to look at Peter again as if he was a ghost, as if he would look away and Peter would disappear before finally grabbing the handle of the door.

He nods once before closing the door behind him, guessing from the look on Pepper’s face before that this was more likely a stalling tactic for the two of them to privately freak out.

Peter’s glad for it anyway, freaking out himself as he jumps up from his place on the bed— pacing back and forth as he tries to make sense of everything. 

The Peter of this world has been dead for five years, their own timeline seemingly matched up and in sync with his— save for the dead part. It stood to reason that a lot of other things stayed the same, his thoughts running back to May, Ned and MJ as he wrings his hands together. 

He needs to see them, needs  _ something  _ of normal— only to remember as he continues to pace that the chances of them acting any more normally than Pepper, Morgan or Tony was next to zero considering  _ he’s been dead for five years.  _

Peter groans, sitting back down on the bed as he puts his head in his hands— gripping his hair as he exhales sharply. 

Tony was dead. His Tony is dead.

But this Tony was alive, alive—  _ alive _ … even if this world’s Peter wasn’t anymore. 

He always knew Parker luck was real. It hadn’t occurred to him that even the multiverse wanted in on the deal, proof positive that neither of them would ever really get what they wanted.

That one of them was always going to mourn the other, one of them would always make the sacrifice play and if Strange was right— and that fucker always was— these were the only two outcomes available to them. 

Peter closes his eyes, the headache he thought he could safely avoid coming back in full force.

_ Fuck.  _


	3. when the days get dark

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Peter asks, knee bobbing up and down as he stares at this version of Strange who-- only thirty minutes after having arrived-- has already pissed him off just as much as his.

“I didn’t say I didn’t know,” Strange says carefully, just as frustratingly as unruffled as Tony is, “I’m saying that there are other factors in play.”

“Can we, or can we not, get Peter home?” Tony asks for what feels like the thirtieth time, Peter’s headache coming back in full force as Strange sighs.

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“What’s so fucking complicated?” Peter snaps, Tony and Strange both looking at him— the former in surprise and the latter in slight annoyance as he continues, “I either can go back home or I’m stuck here.”

Strange and Tony turn their attention away from him and towards each other, getting the distinct impression that the two of them were trying--and failing-- to have some kind of silent conversation that frustrated Peter to no end. It made sense in a way, for this Strange and this Tony to have more of a relationship than his own did. 

They had five more years of time together, five more years than Peter ever had with Tony and-- if the trace look of sadness in Strange’s eyes were any indication-- a common source of grief to wade through. 

Grief that makes Peter feel uncomfortable, the weight of it just as heavy on his chest as the guilt had been just a day prior.

 _Has it even been a day?_ Peter thinks to himself, scrubbing a hand over his face as he sighs into his hand, Strange taking that as his cue. 

“You’re sure you don’t remember anything that might have happened to have caused this? Anything that might have set off a temporal displacement?”

Peter’s brain is a hell of a lot more sober but still frustratingly sluggish, only for the light to go off when the image of purple magic guy comes into focus.

“There was a guy--” Peter begins, Tony perking up slightly as Strange patiently listens, “some sparkly purple magic dude, I don’t know. Looked like a cheap knockoff of _you_.”

Peter gestures towards Strange, catching Tony barely stifling back a laugh as Strange frowns.

“Like me _how_?”

“Obnoxious purple cape. Sparkly things shooting out of his hands. Bad jokes,” Peter rattles off, Tony coughing as Strange gives an exasperated sigh.

“That removes any doubt that this is in fact Peter Parker from another dimension,” he says, Tony shrugging before looking at Peter with that same mix of wonder and awe.

“I don’t know, Strange. Lot snarkier than I remember,” he teases, just the barest hint of levity that is likely to set Peter at ease.

It doesn’t-- not like it would have when he was sixteen.

When Peter was sixteen, he still worshipped the ground Tony Stark walked on, still thought the universe made an ounce of fucking sense, still thought that there was some chance that Parker luck _wasn’t_ always completely out to get him.

Peter is five years older and that much more worn, sighing as he moves into a stand. 

“Glad we got all that sorted out,” he says sarcastically, Tony looking at him in surprise as Strange just stares impassively. “Now back to the point.”

He stands a little taller, glad now for the late stage growth spurt during his freshman-turned-only year of college. It was a physical reminder, if not a metaphorical one, that for as much as the two of them mourned a sixteen-year old martyr that looked and sounded like Peter, the Peter in front of them was _not_ him.

“Can you get me home?” He asks, not missing the way Tony’s facial expression changes slightly from the severity of it.

Peter doesn’t know a lot about multi-dimensional travel, not anything that matters anyway. But he can feel the hurt emanating off of Tony, guessing that the feeling of wanting to see each other again— to undo what happened on a dark and dusty battlefield— was mutual. 

But being here, knowing what he does now of the sixteen-year old Peter Parker who did the unimaginably brave and unimaginably _stupid_ thing that he did just makes Peter feel worse about his own fucked up life.

It confirms all his darkest and deepest fears, a truth that grips him and wrings him up from the inside out. 

If Peter was better, if he’d _been_ better— things would’ve been different.

“Without more information on the ‘sparkly purple magic dude’ as you called him, it’s going to be a bit more difficult,” Strange deadpans, Peter frowning as he continues, “Considering I wasn’t even aware that you had arrived until Stark called me, there’s not anything amiss in the atmosphere.”

“Will being here mess with him,” Tony asks, both Strange and Peter looking at him as if he was an idiot only for Tony to roll his eyes and gesture towards Peter, “biologically, physically. I can’t imagine his atoms are particularly jazzed about being in another dimension.”

Strange looks thoughtful for a moment before shifting his hands in front of him, glowing gold embers sparking from his own hands as he scans Peter.

“Whoa, what—“

“No,” Strange says definitively, bringing his hands back down, “There’s nothing in the spectral plane that indicates anything’s out of sorts.”

He takes a beat, seemingly debating something before pressing forward, “Normally I would be concerned about temporality adjustments, especially with duplicates but…”

He trails off, Peter picking up on his meaning just as Tony does— the latter’s expression turning into the same flavor of grief that’s all too familiar to Peter as they fall silent. 

Peter being _here_ would only be a problem if _this_ world’s Peter was alive. 

But he wasn’t, the existential terror of being _dead_ in another universe— much less being a dead _savior_ — doing magnificently terrible things to Peter’s self esteem as he waves him off.

“Yeah, okay. Well, thanks for— trying I guess?”

Tony looks at him funny, Peter remembering a half-beat too late that in this world Peter was likely nowhere near as assertive as he is as he continues, “I think there was a um,” Peter snaps his fingers, “a glowing rock.”

“A rock,” Strange repeats, Peter nodding a few times.

“Yeah. Purple. Glowy. Kinda looked like a… a Chitauri core? Back from the Battle of New York.”

Peter pauses, eyes dancing between them. “That _did_ happen here right?”

“Yeah, 2012, a long time ago now,” Tony says with a wave, Strange looking a bit more contemplative now. 

Tony just snorts, folding his arms together as he asks, “What, the _rock_ clarified things for you?”

“It may have,” Strange says, irritatingly calm as he nods once before waving his hands in a semi-circle in front of him, disappearing without a trace and without a goodbye as Peter and Tony just stare in bewilderment. 

“Good to know some shit doesn’t change,” Peter says lightly, Tony glancing at him over his glasses.

He has more grey than black in his hair now, the tinges alongside his temples that Peter had attributed to dust five years ago now streaking across his scalp— Tony looking _older_ even if he doesn’t look nearly as worn.

The _last_ image of Tony he has comes to mind, face half-destroyed from the power of the gauntlet and an arc reactor light fading to darkness. Peter clears his throat, Tony huffing out a laugh as he says, “Yeah, he’s been in a real pain in my ass here too.”

“Pain in our ass, at least,” Peter offers, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Till he figures it out.”

Tony nods, a faint smile as he unfurls his hands. 

“Yeah, kid,” he says, Peter forcing himself not to cringe at the moniker, “in the meantime, probably best to keep you here.”

 _Away from the world. Away from everyone who ever knew you— whoever mourned you—since the whole world knows you are_ , goes unsaid.

“Yeah. Least I still have a room.”

Tony grows quiet at that, Peter apparently hitting at a sensitive spot that he hadn't even realized Tony had. It happens in a split second, a flash of overwhelming grief— of _relief_ — of curiosity and hope all passing through Tony’s eyes in that moment. It’s overwhelming for Peter to be on the receiving end of that kind of unbridled emotion, no matter how brief, _especially_ because of who it is coming from.

“Which speaking of, I gotta uh— I should shower. Or nap or some shit. Multidimensional travel takes it out of you,” Peter says lamely, turning away from Tony before he can reply.

His feet feel like lead as he walks back into the cabin and makes a beeline towards his room, every step like pin pricks and a reminder that he wasn’t supposed to be here.

Only for Peter to make the mistake of looking up and seeing another picture, this time one that clearly had to be given to them from May— a picture of the two of them on their last Hanukkah before the Blip, a picture that Peter vividly remembers being taken because of _who_ had been behind the camera—his Tony laughing through the awkwardness and refusing to be in it but then glowing with a look that Peter could only describe as pride when he saw the results.

Peter ignores the uncomfortable feeling in the back of his throat and crawling down his spine, quickening his pace as he rushes to the bedroom that both was and wasn’t his. 

***

On a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of summer, Peter Parker stares up at the ceiling of his bedroom and sighs. 

It’s been exactly four days since he got dropped into a world so fucking beyond his own nightmares that he hadn’t had the wherewithal to dream up— staring at the ceiling fan as it circled over and over again.

Strange had no leads, clearly from the total and complete radio silence he’d given the two of them. Peter didn’t expect for him to thumb through some magical book and just _have_ an answer— considering how little Peter gave him to work with— but he expected more than this from someone who had the audacity to call themselves “Sorcerer Supreme.”

Things with Tony, Pepper and Morgan hadn’t exactly gotten off to a good start and despite the extra four days they had to adjust to the situation— there wasn’t a whole lot of adjustment happening, something Peter himself hadn’t exactly been all that helpful with.

Morgan avoided him, not that Peter blamed her. He looked nothing like the bright eyed, optimistic teenager plastered all over the house and all over the internet. The Morgan _he_ knew idolized Peter still, for reasons he didn’t understand, but this Morgan was wary— almost put out by the random intrusion of an idyllic, quiet life. He didn’t miss the ways she’d cut her eyes at him when Tony would try and make conversation or the short, one-word responses she’d give the few, tepid times Peter tried to talk to her. 

Pepper was kind and just as warm as the Pepper he knew, if not a bit more cautious— torn it seems from making Peter feel welcome and at home with the ever present knowledge that this _wasn’t_ his home, that his mere presence was a sign that something was out of place.

She seemed even more concerned, Peter could tell, with Tony— eyeing the two of them when they would sit down for awkward, quiet dinners and her gaze following after Peter when Tony would invite him down the lab. 

Something that Peter continued to refuse, despite how disappointed Tony would look.

Peter couldn’t do it, could barely stand to be in the same room as him and see the same tortured look in his eyes that made him have a newfound appreciation for the people in his own life— how suffocated he feels by the weight of Tony’s grief being reminiscent of what his own felt like.

Because his own grief is present here too. 

There was no getting rid of it, and Peter had known that for longer than he’d known himself, since the ripe old age of seven when he hadn’t even been a person yet. Peter Parker knows his grief like an old friend, carries it with him and nurtures it and lets it wrap around his chest and squeeze and squeeze and _squeeze_ until his ribs start to crack and his lungs _\--_

So, maybe not a friend. But present nonetheless. 

Present when, on his first night in the house he had paced the length of his room for hours, staving off what was probably an anxiety attack if the tightness in his chest was any indicator. Present still when he finally fell asleep in the early hours of the morning only to dream of a man in a metal suit dying on a sidewalk outside a bodega and a man in a Mets sweatshirt dying on a battlefield. 

His grief is present on the second day in the house, watching Tony cut the crusts off of Morgan’s sandwich at lunch, sitting there at the table like Peter hadn’t listened to his heart stop beating dozens of times the night before-- hundreds of times over the past five years. 

Peter’s grief whispers at him, close against the shell of his ear, when later that night, with his face in his pillow and his hands over his ears, he can still hear the conversation that Pepper and Tony have in the living room. 

So many walls between them and still he has to try and try and try to calm himself down at the sound of Pepper saying, “There’s a chance he doesn’t know-- there’s a chance Stephen can’t fix it,” and even worse than that, Tony’s quiet admission of, “Would that be so bad?”

Peter gets stuck the next day, staring at photographs in the living room, of a life lived without him, beyond him, so full because this man had been saved from the fate that Peter keeps seeing, hearing, feeling when he looks him in the face for too long. He doesn’t know how long he looks at the group photo from what appears to be Tony and Pepper’s vow renewal, but he does know that there are eyes on him for almost the entire time. 

That night, his grief is particularly loud, particularly unruly, and he can’t help himself. He really can’t help himself from stealing a bottle of whiskey from the back of a high-up shelf, clearly not being missed by anyone in this house, and sneaking out to Tony’s garage after everyone has gone to sleep. 

He doesn’t do anything out there except sit and drink and sit and drink and stare at the space that’s so unbelievably _lived-in_ that he can’t even imagine having accepted Tony’s offer to work in here. To share this space with Tony would be, to Peter, akin to psychological torture. 

He forgives himself the dramatics of that thought and drinks enough that he doesn’t dream. 

Peter wakes up on the fourth day and apparently that’s how long it takes for the disorientation of dimension hopping to turn into a buzz at the back of one’s head rather than a full bodily experience. Or maybe he’s just drowned it out with the hangover. 

After a night in the lab looking at all Tony has built, after days of looking at it in the faces of Pepper and Morgan, Peter wants-- or thinks he wants, or wants to want-- to just be grateful. Tony is here and Peter’s grief might be eroding away at his insides but _Tony is here_ and that has to count for something. 

So there’s a part of Peter that wants to hang around Tony, to ask him all the questions he never got to ask his own, to get more context into the hows and whys but stops short— not just because he reasons that it would hurt a hell of a lot more when he finally leaves but for the small, but growing seed of _anger_ that he feels the longer that he’s there— an anger he hadn’t realized he was still processing until he was confronted with the reality of a very much alive Tony Stark, the very much dead Peter Parker and how fucking perfect the world seemed to be, at least in Peter’s eyes. 

Peter, known masochist and avoiding time with a long dead mentor, spent a lot of his days browsing the internet— scouring obscure Reddit threads about magic rocks and dimension hopping sure, but also of himself… of his family, his friends and the literally larger than life legacy that this world’s Peter left behind.

It was objectively ridiculous, to feel jealous of a teenager— much less the alternate teenaged version of _himself_ — but Peter couldn’t help it, stuck in a circular rut as he’d scroll through pages of people talking about their memories of Spider-Man, of their sorrow at learning the hero of the universe hadn’t even gotten his driver’s license, of how his one remaining relative had turned her “tragedy into a triumph” according to the article written about the _Nobel Fucking Peace Prize_ Peter had been given posthumously. May had thrown herself into community work, global and domestic, spearheading initiatives to protect other underaged heroes and low-income students like he’d been at one time with the amount of donations that the foundation started in his name received. 

It was comforting, in a way, to see how much May was thriving— Peter’s heart clenching at how familiar and how so much like _his_ May this world’s looked like in videos and in pictures, telling the world about her nephew and of all the good work that still needed to be done, of all the good that _could_ have been done and the possibilities that wouldn’t exist for Peter anymore but could exist for them.

It took next to nothing to find Ned Leeds, recently graduated from MIT and working with the Future Foundation at the Baxter Building as an engineer. Peter’s mildly surprised that he’s not working with SI only to wonder just how in touch this Ned would be with this world’s Tony Stark. The two hadn’t really met when Tony was alive in his world and even if this Tony made an effort with this Ned, it’d been five years.

As Peter can attest, five years is really fucking long but also really fucking short. 

The one person Peter _hasn’t_ looked up is MJ, even his own abject self-hatred not allowing him to go that far.

He hopes she’s doing okay, a part of Peter reasoning that she has to be— considering she hasn’t spent the past five years in a back and forth, on again, off again relationship with a not quite functioning alcoholic and depressed superhero.

Peter sighs again, rubbing his hands over his face as his leg bounces— restless and anxious to get out of this house, out of this world and the ghosts that haunt him.

Peter fucked up his own life in his own world sure, but at least that was known— he knew he was messed up and it was a mess of his own making. 

This? Living in the larger than life shadow of not a man he had idolized for most of his childhood but rather the child martyr version of his _own_ _fucking self_ , was getting a little too much for him to handle.

It’s the thing that drives him out of his room, past the concerned look of Tony and Pepper and the slight ambivalence from Morgan as he tears out of the house and out towards the lake— the sticky heat of the summer causing his skin to crawl as insects buzzed about.

Peter’s torn from pacing along the edge of the dock and contemplating throwing himself over it, morbidly wondering not for the first time if this wasn’t just some kind of alcohol-poisoning induced hallucination and that if he just _died_ that he’d get sent out of it. 

Peter was fatalistic but not quite dangerous to himself enough to try it, this time around at least.

He hears his footsteps long before any normal person should, still pacing up and down the shoreline and ignoring Tony as he moves back and forth.

“You’re gonna ruin my beach,” Tony says casually, maybe a bit too casually for the hum in the back of Peter’s mind— constant reminders that this Tony knew a different Peter, had _mourned_ a different Peter— the anger of just how similar and just how different their two worlds are simmering in the distance. 

“You can afford it,” Peter says sarcastically, only to pause— thinking that in any world that he was raised better by every May Parker than to be that obnoxious.

“Sorry,” Peter amends, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stops in place, “sorry I’m just—“

“Adjusting to an entirely different dimension and spending your days _stalking_ your teenage self here?”

Peter brings his hand down, frowning as he stares at Tony who is once again frustratingly calm.

“Are you _spying_ on me?”

“Wouldn’t call it spying so much as it’s recon,” Tony says, taking off his glasses and using his shirt to clean them as he says, “you’ve barely come out of there since you got here and I— I gotta tell you, kid, it’s a little concerning.”

“A little—“ Peter lets out a sharp laugh, “you just admitted to spying on me—“

“—not spying—“

“And you think _I’m_ concerning?” Peter asks with a scoff, annoyance and a deep rooted memory coming back to the front of his mind as he says. “Should’ve guessed that. It’s how you found me isn’t it?”

Tony bristles at that, Peter staring at Tony— _this_ Tony, a man objectively _not_ his Tony— and feeling five years worth of long buried anger bubbling up in his stomach as he shakes his head.

“I don’t _get_ you, man. You— you ask a fucking teenager to fly across the world with you for God knows what, dump him for almost a year by proxy of his fucking bodyguard and then what— did your Peter get a fun little internship too? Fancy badge and a pat on the back for being a walking sycophant for all things Avengers?”

“Now wait a minute—“ Tony begins, but Peter’s on a roll now, shaking his head as he continues.

“And then what? Your Peter dies out there in space? Dies again and becomes fucking immortalized for the entire world and so you somehow think you _know_ me? News flash, I’m _not_ that Peter.”

Tony snorts, an ugly sound made uglier from the hurt in Tony’s eyes— hurt that turns into barely contained anger as he says, “Well that’s abundantly clear.”

Peter fumes, taking a step towards him as he asks, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Tony appears to debate with himself for a beat before making a decision, Peter apparently having hit at all the right buttons as he says, “You tell me, Mr. Maybe-it-was-the-whiskey.”

Peter rolls his eyes as he laughs, a harsh and bitter sound before saying, “That’s _real_ fucking rich coming from _you._ ”

Tony puts a hand up, catching himself as he says, “I’m not saying you haven’t been through a tough time. It’s been hard on— on all of us—“

“No, no, no, you don’t get to—to fucking _compare_ what we’ve been through. You don’t know me, you don’t know what the hell I’ve been through,” Peter snarls, Tony looking at him with that same mix of care and concern that just grated on him now as Tony slowly exhales. 

“I could, if you’d tell me.”

Peter shakes his head. “Tell you… what exactly? That I’m a raging alcoholic? A washed up college drop out at the ripe old age of twenty-one?”

Peter laughs, hearing himself and how unhinged he sounds but finding that he can’t bring himself to care as he says, “How about the fact that my identity got outed by some asshole with a vendetta against _you_ ? That you— Tony fucking Stark, who should understand what it’s like to have that kind of legacy dropped on your shoulders when you’re way too fucking young to carry it— authorized a _sixteen_ year old to have military drones?”

Tony’s face grows pale, eyes widening as he says, “How did—“

“That was _you_ ,” Peter says, pointing his finger towards Tony’s face. “You and your ‘looking towards the future’ _bullshit_.”

Peter’s chin trembles but his back is straight, glowering at Tony as he says, “Fuck you.”

“Peter—“ Tony tries to say as Peter moves to walk past him, Tony extending a hand towards him that Peter throws his shoulder away.

“No, _fuck you._ I don’t know what the hell brought me here but I need to figure it out. I can’t— I’m not gonna do this anymore.”

Tony follows after Peter, walking beside him as he says with that same unnerving calm, “Look, why don’t we go inside and just—“

“Just—“ Peter throws his hands up, pausing and feeling angry and tired and older than he thinks he’s ever felt as he cuts him off, “stop. Just stop okay?”

Tony’s looking at him like he’s at a loss for words, Peter feeling furious once again that he never even had the chance to know a Tony that could be so level-headed and patient as he shakes his head.

“I’m not your Peter. I’m not sixteen. I know I’m nothing like you wanted me to be but just—“

Peter sighs, taking a step back.

“Leave me alone.”

Peter’s not sure what hurts worse as he walks away— the ache of how out of place and of how much of a failure that he feels, or that Tony doesn’t try to argue with him— staying silent as Peter walks back to the cabin. 

***

Peter gets to his guest room and realizes that he doesn’t have anything to pack. 

He’s fueled by this instinct to run away, so strong that he can barely carry it as he looks at the stack of borrowed clothes he’s been wearing for the past four days and the tablet that he was pretty sure really just was a spare that lived in this room for guests. 

The tablet that Tony had been using to spy on him-- spying on him, judging him, criticizing him behind his back for shit that Tony had no right to comment on. 

Peter decides that he’s already fucked this relationship far enough into the ground that adding theft to the docket of terrible things he’s done isn’t all that dramatic of a step, so he grabs a duffle bag out of the closet, stuffs everything he doesn’t own in this world into it (save anything easily trackable), and strides out of the room. 

His heart is pounding at a pace unhealthy for the already deepening fracture it bears right down the middle, right there between ventricles and seeping blood out into his chest cavity. He can’t stay here, he justifies to himself as he slings the bag over his shoulder and makes his way down the stairs. 

He can’t be what they need him to be and they can’t be the same for him-- there’s just too much piled up in between them for this situation to be at all tolerable let alone beneficial, so he has to go. 

“The two of you just need to talk. Just suck it up and _talk about it.”_

Peter pauses his descent on the stairs when he hears Pepper’s voice from the kitchen, sad and desperate and a bit more like the Pepper he had known back when she had just lost the love of her life and the father of her child. 

“I’ve tried the talking,” Tony replies in a harsh whisper. “He’s very much not interested in the talking.” 

“This is a _chance,_ Tony,” Pepper implores. “You both have a chance here and you just need to make him see--”

Peter doesn’t want to hear any more of that particular line of reasoning and decides to keep moving. Just in the other direction.

He backs up quietly the way he came, making it to the top of the stairs without being heard and spinning around to hurry back down the hall towards his-- his, his, his-- fucking room. Now, Peter doesn’t have a particularly long history with running away, it’s a new characteristic that he’s found in adulthood, but he’s a fast learner. 

There are perks to being able to crawl down the outsides of buildings and run quickly and quietly down long dirt roads, after all. 

He hasn’t, however, ever had to deal with a tenacious young girl before, which he realizes with stark anxiety as he rounds the corner into the guest room and finds Morgan sitting on his bed as though she _knew._

“You’re leaving,” she says, it’s not a question and she doesn’t sound all that heartbroken about the fact of it either. 

“Thinking about it,” he responds carefully, glancing over his shoulder and picking up on the faint, whispered conversation still happening in the kitchen. 

“They’re not gonna like that,” Morgan tells him, drawing Peter’s gaze back to her and the innocent kicking of her feet. 

“Probably not,” Peter agrees. “But you’d be fine with it, right?” he lifts a curious eyebrow at her. 

Morgan shrugs. “Everything’s weird since you got here,” she says. “Different.”

“Yeah,” he breathes out, crossing the room as casually as he can manage until he’s standing beside the window. “I think it’ll be easier for all of you if I get out of your hair, yeah?”

Morgan considers this, all nine years of her. 

“You know,” she says contemplatively. “I know all the stories about you, but they left out a lot of stuff I think.” 

Peter hums out a sound of acknowledgement. “Probably,” he says earnestly. 

“People are more complicated than stories,” she says with wisdom beyond her years and circumstance, kicking Peter straight in the gut with the rightness of it. “I think if you need to leave you should leave. Even if it makes Dad sad.” 

“Thanks, Mo,” he says gently, the familiar nickname slipping out all on its own and making something like intrigue grow on the girl’s face. 

“Do you know me there?” she asks. “Where you’re from.”

“Yeah,” he laughs softly. 

“Am I cool?”

Peter grins at her a little more fully then, a little more genuinely. 

“Not even the multiverse could make Morgan Stark any less cool.” 

Morgan actually smiles at that, and then, in an act of mercy, says, “You should go now. Before they stop arguing.” 

Peter nods and quietly slides open the window, sliding one leg out and straddling the sill for a moment as he looks back at her. 

“Think you can get me thirty minutes?” he asks. 

“Oh, for sure.”

“Thanks kid,” he offers her a small wave. “See ya around.”

Peter Parker doesn’t have a particularly long history with running away, but it’s getting longer. 

***

He manages to hitch a ride with a trucker about two miles down the road from where the endlessly long private drive to the lake house lets out. 

Peter’s got a hoodie pulled up in Summer to hide his face a little bit, but he’s also not all that concerned with a stranger recognizing him as the dead kid from that alien war five years ago, no matter how famous Spider-Man and Peter Parker have become. 

He’s aged since then for one, and not _well_ to boot. Taller, sure, but also with more wear and tear on his face, under his eyes, in the very way he carries himself. 

“Where you headed?” Frank the truck driver asks after Peter’s buckled himself into the front seat. 

“Manhattan, if it’s on your way,” he responds, duffle in the footwell with his muddy sneakers. 

Manhattan, luckily, is on Frank’s way and they spend the majority of the trip in companionable silence or listening to the radio, for which the emotionally overwrought Peter is deeply grateful. 

Instead, Peter spends his time in the passenger seat of that eighteen-wheeler watching out the window and thinking about his plan for the first time since acting on impulse and jumping out a window. He knows, realistically, that the first place Tony will look for him is with May, and he also knows that he’s not ready to face any reaction that she might have to seeing him in this way. 

He can take disappointment from Tony Stark, he’s well accustomed to it, but he’s already let down his own May enough for one lifetime to drag a whole other iteration of her into his whirlwind of self-pity and self-destruction. 

Which leaves his options significantly more limited as he watches a familiar city skyline grow closer in the distance. He’s homeless here without May, just like he would be in his own world, just like he would be in any world for reasons both financial and emotional. 

When Frank drops him off, Peter bids him adieu with a wave and a thank you and an apology that he doesn’t have any cash to give him. And then he starts walking, familiar streets towards a familiar side of town with his head dipped low and his hood blocking his face from the world but also the world from his gaze. 

He’s running short on options, but this is one that he believes-- has to believe, for the sake of his sanity and his ongoing survival-- is always going to be there. 

It was in his incessant web searching that Peter tracked down this address, the address of the apartment where he is now climbing the steps to the fourth floor, the address of the man who doesn’t need this disruption in his life, but-- Peter is running short on options. 

He takes a deep breath and he pushes his hood back so as to allow the whole shock of it to hit at once, hopefully get through the initial insanity of it quicker. 

And he knocks. 

“Just a minute!” comes calling from inside and even the sound of his voice makes something in Peter settle, tips something a little closer to the edge. 

When the door opens and Ned Leeds catches sight of him for the first time in five years, undead and looking every bit of it, his face does something that Peter isn’t sure even _he_ has seen before. 

He’s grown too after all. 

_“Peter?”_ he gapes, somewhere between frightened and angry and awed. 

Peter just grimaces out a smile. “Hey, dude.”

A beat. 

_“What the fuck--”_


	4. just don’t waste it

When Peter steps inside Ned Leeds’ apartment, he worries for a moment that this Ned lost his Peter too young, too early in the chaos to be as accustomed to the sort of crazy that Peter Parker carried with him, and thus less receptive to the absurd truth that is this Peter’s story. 

But if there’s one thing that Peter should never have any doubt of, it’s Ned’s ability to take the ridiculous in stride. 

He cries of course, so Peter does too, and he wraps him up in the tightest hug Peter has maybe ever experienced, and Peter feels guilty for a moment. Because it’s such a relief for someone to be _this happy_ to see him, to say so out loud again and again and again until Peter actually believes that this Ned had missed him so deeply instead of the other guy. 

The hero guy. 

“Okay, so just to recap,” Ned says, once the crying has stopped and he’s made them a pot of coffee and sat Peter down on the couch. “You’re Peter Parker from another dimension where Iron Man used the gauntlet instead and now you’ve ended up here because of a purple wizard and a weird glowy rock?”

“That’s a concise summary, yeah,” Peter laughs-- actually laughs for the first time at the utter insanity of the whole thing. 

“You have to tell me everything,” Ned leans his elbow on the back of the couch and rests his head in his hand, looking at Peter with awe and intrigue and joy. It’s overwhelming, the love of this man, the exuberance that in another world has been largely replaced by worry and exasperation. “I mean-- Five years! Peter, God, I mean-- Did we go to college together like we planned in your world? Were we roommates? I wanna hear all of it.”

Peter’s heart stutters and his shoulders tense and he covers it up with a grin and a, “That’s nothing interesting, I mean-- Dude, you work at the Baxter Building! That’s-- Fuck, I’m so proud of you. _So_ proud, man.” 

“You looked me up?” Ned’s eyes go soft, but Peter just looks at him like he’s lost it. “Like, beyond my address, I mean?”

“Of course I looked you up,” he says as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. To him, it is. There’s no universe where he doesn’t want to know that Ned Leeds is happy and healthy. “You’re my best friend.” 

Ned covers his mouth with a hand, and it looks like he might start crying again, but he shakes his head and says, “It’s so good to see you. I can’t tell you how-- _good_ it is to see you.” 

“You too,” Peter smiles at him, choking on feelings he doesn’t want to explore too deeply. “I’m sorry-- for, um-- dropping in out of nowhere--”

“Are you kidding?” Ned balks. “If I had found out you were here and I didn’t get to meet you, I-- I would’ve lost it. And this is-- it’s so lucky that you’re here now ‘cause I’ve been, uh-- Well, I’ve been considering moving.” 

“Really?” Peter’s eyebrows shoot up, not having realized before how much he had Ned and New York linked in his head. “Like, leaving the city?”

“There are a lot of good tech jobs on the west coast right now,” Ned smiles a little sheepishly, like he’s ashamed to be considering this. “Like, opportunities for, um, growth? I dunno. The city is just-- it’s home, but I’ve got so much history here.”

Ned’s face says what his words don’t, because he’s looking at Peter and Peter _knows_ that he’s the history. That his death here is the history, maybe even his life too. 

“Do you want to go?” Peter asks carefully, feeling like he’s jumped to the other side of a conversation he’s been having for well over a year. _Are you happy, Peter?_

“I’m not sure?” Ned makes a face, but Peter knows it’s a lie. He knows when people are lying to make him feel better. “It’s complicated.”

“Ned,” Peter laughs softly. “California would be beyond lucky to have you. You would kill it out there.” 

“You think?” he asks, hopeful, looking for certainty in Peter, having _trust_ in him. It’s very nearly unbearable. 

“I _know,”_ Peter assures him. “And it’s not like the city’s going anywhere. You always have the option to come home, right?” 

“Yeah,” Ned responds softly, quiet for a beat before seeming to shake himself out of the moment. “But that’s not-- I wanna know what _you’ve_ been up to for five years, Spider-Man.” 

With a simple grin, bright and earnest, Ned shatters the illusion that Peter is the strong, unflappable foundation of this relationship. That he’s the one with the advice to give or the assurance to offer. 

He could lie in this moment, that _is_ an option available to him and he’s painfully aware of it, even as he chooses not to just make shit up. Because although there’s a chance that Ned wouldn’t be able to tell-- five years being a good long while to lose your ability to read a person-- Peter didn’t think it was the case, and also didn’t know that his ever-growing guilt complex could handle it. 

“I-- Um, y’know,” he flounders, laughing a stilted laugh. “Just the regular neighborhood stuff. No genocidal aliens in the last few years.”

“Sure, but like what about you?” Ned brushes off what Peter hopes isn’t too obvious of discomfort. “Did you end up deciding to major in biochem? Or physics?”

“I-- I-- Well,” Peter scrubs a hand through his messy hair. “I never declared a major?” 

“Oh, did you create your own?” Ned asks curiously. “I know ESU has a good design your own major program-- Or did you not go to ESU?”

“No, I went to ESU,” Peter stops meeting Ned’s eye, looks down in his own lap. “I just didn’t exactly-- finish.” 

He feels Ned crane his neck down, trying to look at Peter’s face with a frown marring his own and _now_ it feels more like his world, totally and entirely. A different couch in a different apartment but Peter’s still a fuck up and Ned’s still trying to make him feel better. 

“You’re being weird,” Ned says after he finishes studying him for a moment. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not being weird,” Peter looks up at him, scowling and defensive and hating himself for it. “I mean, you know, except for the whole dimension hopping thing.” 

“Yeah, no, that’s not what I meant,” Ned responds flatly. 

Peter’s knee bounces restlessly as he looks out the window to see the freshly indigo sky bleeding into the rooftops of the city. Tony will be tracing security footage with facial recognition by now to try and get a location on him. Either that or celebrating that Peter’s decided not to be his problem anymore. 

“Is it alright if I crash here tonight?” Peter turns his head and changes the subject abruptly, startling Ned a little bit, but not enough to keep him from responding without hesitation. 

“Of course,” he says. “Always, Peter.” 

It’s a familiar sort of _giving in_ that Peter knows all of the ins and outs of. He can deflect like its an Olympic sport and he always gets the gold fucking medal. 

But even still, when he falls asleep on the couch later, with his best friend snoring quietly the next room over, it’s from a tiredness that doesn’t feel debilitating. 

He’s out of place and he’s far from home, but Peter at least feels safe here. 

Because at least here, the only dead man he has to come face to face with is in the mirror. 

***  
  


”Yeah, uh— I’m just gonna take a personal day.”

Peter squeezes his eyes a little bit, the vague pressure of an almost headache building right behind his eyes as he tries not to move-- filled with guilt at eavesdropping on Ned’s private conversation with what sounds like his boss but also desperate to hear what Ned has to say about him in a private conversation with what sounds like his boss. 

Maybe he should add narcissism to the laundry list of things he should talk about with his non-existent therapist. 

“No, I’m good, thanks Casey. I just uh, just some family came up to town unexpectedly,” Ned says quietly, bustling around in the kitchen. Peter’s heart squeezes uncomfortably with how casually this Ned calls him family, just as much as he holds back a laugh when Ned swears from the coffee machine starting up and causing more noise than what he probably intended.

“Yeah, for sure. Just send the plans over and I’ll take a look at them when I can,” Ned says, throwing Peter out of his thoughts and back into the present-- of how grown up and put together this Ned sounds. 

His own Ned was the opposite of a mess— unlike how Peter felt— working as a teacher at Brooklyn Visions Academy and doing his own thing. But there was a slight difference between them, one that would only be noticeable to someone like Peter who has known Ned for the better half of his life.

This Ned has lived through a specific kind of grief that Peter can barely fathom, not just of losing your best friend but to lose him in a way that the entire world mourns him-- wondering for a beat if he just fucked over _this_ Ned too by showing up at his apartment. If Peter’s identity was outed in this world, if May spent the past few years in the public eye, if Peter was so known that _elementary schools_ were named after him and he won a _Nobel Fucking Peace Prize_ then it was only a question of just how much of Ned’s life, by virtue of being his best friend, had been publicly invaded. 

It leaves an unsettled feeling in his stomach and an ache in his chest about being a burden in two entirely different universes and in two entirely different ways, only to be further magnified when Ned hangs up the phone and walks back into the living room saying, “I know you’re up.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Peter says, not even pretending to be asleep-- looking at Ned who just smiles at him and extends a black cup of coffee to him.

“I can always tell. You-- or, my-- shit, I don’t know how to…” Ned trails off, looking a little helpless as Peter takes the coffee cup from him, closing his eyes and letting the smell wake him up before sitting up and slowly taking a sip.

“It’s fine,” Peter says, getting Ned’s meaning because of course he would always understand Ned Leeds— no matter what universe he was in— as he continues, “He—your Peter I mean, we’re both Peter Parker but we’re— we’re different people.”

“Yeah,” Ned says, a hint of sadness and fondness and something else that just twists at Peter’s gut as he makes room for Ned to sit down. “It’s still really, _really_ weird. Seeing you.”

“Sorry,” Peter begins, only for Ned to shake his head quickly.

“No, I’m-- dude, I meant what I said yesterday. I don’t care what brought you here or how long you’re staying but if you hadn’t-- if I hadn’t gotten the chance to see you,” Ned snorts, shaking his head before taking a long sip of his coffee, “I would’ve been pissed.”

“I’d deserve it. You’re my best friend. I’d never leave you behind.” 

The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them, Peter instantly filled with regret with how Ned’s face falls-- wondering not for the first time how he could possibly be so fucking smart and yet still be so fucking stupid.

Because Peter-- _his_ Peter-- _had_ left him behind, thinking that if things went down the same way they had in this world that they had in his own, that his Peter had swung himself out of a bus and into a fight he hadn’t been prepared for, only to come back after five years and what would’ve felt like an instant, only to die in a battlefield upstate— with Ned having to deal with the fallout of a world thrown into chaos completely on his own. 

Ned, to his credit, is quick to school his emotions-- forcing a smile that feels so terribly fake that it hurts as he shrugs and says, “I know you wouldn’t, man.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter says immediately, regretting inserting himself into this Ned’s life and fucking it up just as badly as he had his own as Ned shakes his head again.

“It’s fine, I mean,” Ned lets out something that sounds a little too shaky to sound fully like a laugh, “must be weird as hell for _you_.”

“Because I’m dead?” Peter asks jokingly, wondering whether five years was long enough to joke about such a thing, knowing damn well from his own experiences that five years really meant nothing. 

“Yeah, I mean what,” Ned taps his fingers against his coffee mug, “you get sent here because of some purple magic dude and a rock and you’re just-- what-- have to just wait around for some other sorcerer dude to figure it out?”

Ned shrugs, Peter watching him and feeling infinitely grateful that no matter the universe, no matter how else things might’ve shaked out, that he was still lucky enough to still be in the orbit of Ned Leeds and to call him his best friend as he says, “I’d be freaking out, dude.”

“I’m definitely freaking out,” Peter answers honestly, Ned laughing as Peter takes a long drink of his coffee-- pleasantly surprised that it isn’t the cheap stuff that his Ned has in his apartment. Working for the Baxter Building must have some perks, at least. 

“Well I don’t know how you and your uh, me, calmed down but my Peter kicked _ass_ at Beast Slayer,” Ned says, setting his mug down on the coffee table he has in his living room-- yet another sign that this Ned is doing particularly well for himself since Peter’s Ned does fine but his furniture doesn’t look like it came from the Pottery Barn. “Does that sound like something you’d want to do?”

Peter smiles, feeling an incredible sense of both sympathy and compassion for the Ned Leeds in front of him-- pushing out his own insecurities of how much he feels he’s failed his own Ned and thinking more of the one what _this_ one had to have lived with. 

Peter can’t even begin to imagine how he would survive if he lost Ned Leeds, that even for all the problems and the disappointment that he felt between them, that _losing_ him wouldn’t be something that Peter’s sure he could ever recover from. 

The fact that this Ned is not just living, but thriving soothes Peter-- only to feel something catch in his throat at the hope in his eyes, wondering if thriving was really an apt description because of how painfully _young_ Ned Leeds looks-- staring at the older, more fucked up version of the best friend he never got to see grow up with a sense of longing that clenches ar Peter’s heart. 

“Yeah man,” Peter says, voice cracking before he clears his throat, “sounds great.”

***

On a Thursday afternoon in the middle of summer, Peter Parker feels better than he has in years. 

There’s a lightness that flows easily between them, playing video games like they’re sixteen again-- as if Peter hasn’t fucked up their relationship by mooching off his kindness for the better half of five years and for Ned that Peter _was alive_. 

It was easy to forget that there was anything else going on or anything else they had to worry about, not when they’re talking shit with video games and ordering in boxes of pizza-- Ned joking that he forgot just how much Peter could eat when the food arrived. 

Peter’s halfway through the seventh slice of his own personal large pepperoni pizza when Ned drops the bomb on him that he hadn’t even been waiting to fall, almost choking on his slice when Ned stares at the video game and asks, “So you dating anyone?”

Peter swallows the offending piece of pizza whole, coughing a few times before taking a drink of his soda.

“Uh kind of, maybe. I’m-- I mean, do you-- did you remember MJ? Michelle Jones,” Peter clarifies, thinking back to high school and how little the three of them interacted back then-- before the Blip, before a European trip from hell, before the never ending and near constant failures that Peter’s accumulated in the years since.

Ned’s eyes widen again, opening his mouth then closing it before he replies, “Yeah.”

“We’ve kind of got this… thing,” Peter says, wincing slightly as Ned frowns and pauses the game. 

“A thing?”

“We broke up,” Peter amends, “a few months ago. But we uh, we do that.” Peter moves the pizza around in his hand, “Break up, make up, break up. It’s-- we’ll be fine.”

 _I hope so at least_ , Peter thinks to himself but doesn’t say, Ned growing quiet and a little distracted as Peter redirects the question and asks, “How about you?”

“Huh?” 

“You seeing anyone?” Peter asks, wondering if he already knows the answer to that question considering Ned had already mentioned a move across the country and from what he’s seen of his apartment from having laid out on his couch all night and rushed off to the bathroom a few times, no one else lived with him.

Which is why he’s surprised when Ned nods and says, “Yeah, actually. My uh, my boyfriend Jeremy and I have been together for… two years?” 

“Two— that’s amazing man,” Peter says with a smile, “how’d you guys meet?”

Ned looks awkward then, thumb tapping against the controller as he says, “Because of MJ, actually.”

“Oh,” Peter says, surprised in a way that he probably shouldn’t that two of the closest people in his life in his world were close in this one, “that’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Ned says, his eyes glazing over as Peter watched him get lost in some memory, “we didn’t really— I don’t know how it was for you in your world but we weren’t really friends in high school till um, after the Snap.”

Peter nods. “We call it the Blip in ours.”

“That’s… weird,” Ned says, Peter smirking and motioning for him to continue, “after— after everything, all us Snapped kids stuck together. I uh, I went to MIT for college and since MJ and I were both up there—“

“She went to MIT?” Peter interrupts, Ned glancing up and shaking his head.

“Nah, Harvard. She could’ve though, she’s so fucking smart,” Ned says with a laugh, Peter’s heart clenching once more at the fondness in it— of the implied closeness and affection that he can feel bleeding through Ned’s every word. “She was the best for math during AcaDec but she wanted to get into acting. I thought she was gonna go to NYU or Julliard or something but…” 

Ned trails off, Peter feeling just as he did when Ned described moving across the country— of a city filled with ghosts, wondering if the same people in this MJ’s life snapped just as they had in his, the faintest wonder if _he_ had anything to do with that too.

“Anyway, we got closer, in college. She’s— I mean, you know her.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, clearing his throat, “she’s pretty great.”

It’s quiet for a beat, Peter brimming with questions and unsure of where to start only for Ned to have mercy on him and answer at least one before he gets to ask as he says, “She’s really good too. At acting, I mean. Like, _really_ good. When she gets on stage it’s like she— she becomes another person. I don’t want to say like possessed or something but she’s just—“

“In the zone,” Peter offers, Ned nodding with a smile on his face— Peter’s mind going to _his_ MJ and how she looked when she was “in the zone” for her own work, splatters of paint all up and down her arms and across her smock when she was working on a piece.

“I went to like, every show. We even lived together for awhile before she moved in with her boyfriend—“

It takes all of Peter’s self-control not to interrupt, just barely fading out of the conversation as he tries to reconcile MJ dating someone else only to kick himself with the reminder that for this world— they’d never dated at all. Likely hadn’t even been friends. 

It bothers him, in the consistent way that learning about this world’s Peter continues to do so, to think of any Peter out there that didn’t get to know MJ. 

“—he was one of her costars and we just kinda… hit it off,” Ned finishes, Peter filling in the blanks that he’s meaning how he met his own boyfriend as he nods.

“And he’s okay… with you moving to California?”

Ned looks sheepish then, laughing as he says, “He’s already out there, actually. Got a role on some cheesy CW drama.”

Peter smiles, Ned immediately raising a hand as he says, “I’m not like, moving there _because_ of him or anything. That’s— that’d be totally stupid.”

“Totally,” Peter parrots, even if he has zero credibility to stand on considering the current state of his own love life as Ned continues.

“But it’d be nice, you know? I was already thinking of moving over there after graduation because of all that’s out there but then the Future Foundation had such a great gig and the Baxter Building itself is like, _a dream_ …”

“You don’t have to explain it to me, man,” Peter says not unkindly, oddly feeling as if Ned is trying to justify his decisions. Something that of all people, he shouldn’t have to feel he needs to do with Peter. “If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“Thanks dude,” Ned beams, turning his attention back to the game only for Peter to blurt out, “so MJ’s dating someone?”

Ned looks over at him, smirking before he says, “Yeah, that must be weird for you.”

Peter shrugs with a little too much forced nonchalance as he replies, “If she’s happy…”

“She is,” Ned says quietly, something in his eyes that Peter can’t quite read— the very fact that he can’t bothering him as Ned says, “Harry’s a great guy and—“

“Harry? Not— Harry _Osborn_?” Peter sputters out, having a fear he hadn’t even realized he could have confirmed when Ned’s eyes widen.

“How’d you know?”

Peter lets out a laugh, a choked off and bitter sound that makes Ned’s eyebrows furrow as Peter says, “Wild guess.”

Peter sighs, putting the slice of pizza he has in his hand down— wildly unhungry now as he says, “Good for her. I’m glad she’s— she’s happy.”

Ned stays quiet, long enough for Peter to just barely pull himself out of his pity party as he stares at Peter— suddenly realizing what emotion it is flashing across his eyes and being thrown at _who_ it’s directed towards.

It’s protectiveness, something just barely itching at the back of Peter’s mind as Ned carefully says, “Are you… jealous?”

“No! No, of course not. I’m— I’m glad she found happiness here because,” Peter laughs again, wiping his fingers on the pants he’s had on from yesterday, “she’s— she’s not always so happy in my world so—“

Peter cuts himself off, closing his eyes before saying, “Glad she found someone better.”

There’s a pause, a brief moment for Peter to feel well and truly sorry for himself, before he’s completely thrown off guard with the vehemence in Ned’s voice— glancing up in surprise as his best and oldest friend says, “I forgot how really fucking stupid you can be sometimes.” 

“What—“

“She’s— yeah, MJ is happy and I’m glad cause this,” Ned motions towards him, “this fucking _sucked_ for us, you know?”

Peter’s struck silent with how angry Ned looks, if only to recognize that it’s not anger but hurt— feeling a weird sense of déjà vu as Ned presses forward.

“Peter, when you died it was— it was fucking _awful_ ,” Ned’s voice hitches, Peter feeling like a complete asshole as Ned clears his throat, “you— you were there and you were just— just gone. And to make it worse, the whole fucking _world_ found out about Spider-Man. We couldn’t— none of us could go anywhere without people wanting to know more about you, crying like they knew you when _we actually did_.”

Ned’s hands shake as he sets the controller down, Peter staying silent and feeling guilty beyond belief as Ned works to compose himself— a part of Peter wondering if this was a conversation that Ned had had with himself before, thinking of all the things he’d tell his Peter if he ever got the chance.

It’s a feeling Peter knows well, considering what he’d said to this universe’s Tony a day before.

“She told me once, freshman year when we finally moved out of the city that she had a crush on you, back in high school,” Ned says quietly, his eyes pointedly averted from Peter’s, “she figured out your secret, before it all came out. She— she liked you a lot, dude.”

Peter still says nothing, not trusting himself not to make this worse as Ned finally looks back up, holding his ground.

“She’s happy, yeah. We’re— I mean we’re all doing okay, doing great, even… all things considered.”

Ned’s eyes grow cloudy, Peter feeling rightfully reprimanded for ever saying so callous, for being so self-absorbed, for being so damn obnoxious to not think about anyone else for a change as Ned presses his lips together, before sighing.

“But losing you was the hardest shit we ever did.”

***

It is, to put it mildly, a little awkward afterwards.

It’s Ned and Ned is his best friend but his confession— the _fervency_ of it and the pained look in his eyes reminded Peter with such stunning clarity that for as much as he knew Edward James Leeds, how much he loved him and knew Ned loved him back— that _this_ was a Ned who had lived through something Peter hopes he never would have to.

The same familiar, awful guilt that fucked him over in his own world sat like a rock against his chest in this one— hating himself for slipping out the window and onto the fire escape when Ned excused himself for the bathroom, but thinking he’d hate himself more for having to face the possibility of disappointing yet another Ned Leeds with his own inadequacies. 

He’s able to navigate down to the alleyway adjacent to Ned’s building quickly, pulling a hood over his head and ducking down as he chose a direction and walked as fast as he could without arousing suspicion.

Peter knows this is a bad decision as he makes it but he can’t take it— can’t face it, a hot roll of shame and cowardice flows over him that he hasn’t felt since he was fourteen-years-old and watching his uncle bleed out in front of him but Peter’s too far gone— gritting his teeth and walking away from the only other person in this universe who knows he’s alive.

He walks and he walks and he walks— without a purpose or a goal except to somehow walk away from the regret that he feels at leaving Ned behind again, just when he’d promised that he never would.

Peter’s been good at breaking promises lately anyway. 

***

It’s still the dead of summer, despite the cool breeze flowing through the city— so Peter knows he looks more than a little suspicious about wearing a hoodie and trying his best to hide away from the cameras Tony and his tech are no doubt actively scanning to try and find him.

But Peter’s also in New York, people passing him by without a second glance— only for a few to mutter under their breath when he stops mid step and glances up at the wall attached to some bodega, the massive mural painted across the building causing the weight in his chest to grow heavier. 

It’s of him— of Spider-Man— faded and a little worn but from the new shades of paint across the edges, it’s clearly been touched-up.

Peter’s eyes drift from the white eyes of the spider mask to the freakishly impressive representation of what he looked like when he was sixteen— the image a recreation of a picture of him goofing off with Ned, in the lunchroom at Midtown, one that Peter _remembers taking_ — which only serves to incite the anxiety he’s been not so successfully avoiding coming back to bite him in the ass.

Peter’s known that he was dead—or a version of him at least— since that first whispered _Pete_ from Tony a few days ago but even now— even still— it takes the wind out of him to think of the Peter Parker of this world, sixteen and Spider-Man and completely incapable of truly _grasping_ the long-term consequences of his actions, to take the gauntlet and snap his fingers. 

Peter— _this_ Peter— was a hero, a savior, a _martyr_. While his own guilt and shame that he couldn’t live up to the legacy of his own dead teenage self sat in his gut, there was a more pressing, bittersweet feeling running through him as his eyes travel down the mural and see a few little candles at the end— still lit and surrounded by little cards even five years later.

There was nothing glamorous about dying, nothing beautiful in it and nothing to celebrate— not even for something as noble and as just of a cause as this Peter clearly did. 

Peter was well-aware of what it felt like to live in the absence of a person no longer there, to live in the shadow and the weight of what it feels like to know you’re still breathing when the person you love isn’t. 

Yet there he is, or a version of him anyway, less of a person being mourned but a symbol— May’s words from what feels like a lifetime ago coming back to him.

_“You are not just Spider-Man.”_

Peter thinks back to how he felt at sixteen, how simultaneously terrified and fearless he felt when everything was going down— the longest day of his life starting on a bus trip to MoMa and ending in a battlefield upstate.

This Peter died as Spider-Man and now is forever immortalized because of it— something that aches at Peter if only for the reminder of his own worst fears.

Peter knew every day that he put on the suit that the chances of him never coming back home, of him _dying_ in the suit, was a distinct possibility— only for it to hit him the gut as he finally tears his eyes away from the mural and towards the sidewalk that lately it’s as if that’s _all_ he expected of himself.

That the way he’d been treating himself— May, his friends, anyone he’s loved or whoever loved him— there’s a clarity now that there hadn’t been before that makes him question if it hadn’t all just been a tactic to push them away so that when the inevitable did happen, it wouldn’t hurt so much.

It doesn’t feel noble now that Peter’s walking himself through this realization just as he continues to walk down the sidewalk, crossing the street with the rest of the crowd. The teenage martyr version of him had left behind a legacy of a life cut short— too young and years worth of potential gone in an act of reckless bravery. 

The twenty-one year old barely functioning alcoholic version of him— it twists at something in Peter’s gut to think of what his legacy would be now, only to further churn up his insides of how much _more_ hurt May, MJ, Ned and anyone else would be because of how he’s treated them for the last few years.

If Tony Stark dying had proved anything to him— a man who was brilliant and fascinating and a hero in his right but always kept Peter at arm’s length right up until the moment he tugged him tight on a battlefield, only to _die_ minutes later— pushing people away did nothing to quell the ache that came from losing them. 

That realization— and the truth that even with all of this, that Peter still can’t see an ending for him where he lives to be old and gray, that dying as Spider-Man isn’t something he’ll ever truly be able to avoid, something that up until this moment he doesn’t think he’s ever _really_ reckoned with— sits with him uncomfortably as he walks through the city, feeling like a ghost in a city where he already was one. 

***

Peter feels like he’s been wandering for hours but it can’t have been more than one— guessing that it was any minute now that some drone or— if he was really feeling pissed off a suit— came to pick him up.

He’s finally debating whether he should head back to Ned’s, looking for a good subway exit when his eye catches on a building that looks familiar— his heart beating a little fast as his throat grows dry.

FEAST, the same shelter that May— _his_ May— volunteered at right in front of him.

Guilt starts to lodge in his throat when he thinks of her, wondering if time is passing in the same way back home that it is here. If so, he’s been missing for almost five days— their last conversation rolling around in his mind just as much as the guilt does in May likely thinking that he’d run off without a word.

 _Or maybe I’m dead. That rock just killed me and gave me this weird as fuck fantasy afterlife_ , Peter thinks to himself— moving to turn towards the subway when he stops in his tracks, his throat bone dry when he locks eyes with someone as they walk up the subway steps.

Peter can see the moment her eyes widen, can see the shake of her hands, and _hear_ the way her heart quickens as they stare at each other— Peter wondering for a brief moment if he just had the most absurd Parker luck or this really is some fantasy from hell to make him confront his demons.

May takes a tentative step forward, brown eyes searching his in a way that’s so familiar that it hurts.

“ _Peter_?”


	5. you don’t gotta be a saint

It’s that same face, that same tone of voice, that same _name_ on the exhale of their breath that keeps happening to him. It keeps happening to _him,_ which is a selfish way to think about this whole endeavor, because more than anything _he_ is happening to _them_. 

To her. To May, standing a few feet in front of him and looking around as if to try and figure out whether or not anyone else is seeing him. 

“I’m losing it,” she says under her breath. “I’m finally losing it, I--”

She starts to brush past him with a harsh shake of her head, because he’s still just staring at her in his moment of self-pity and guilt and all the things that accompany his adult relationship with this woman. 

Well, not _this_ woman, but that’s too complicated for him to really juggle at the moment. 

She’s turning the corner, walking around towards the back entrance if this FEAST is set up the same as his FEAST, and instead of handling this in a less jarring way, Peter chases after her. 

“May, wait,” he has to jog a little to catch up, startling her into whipping around to look at him again. 

Disbelief. Anger. Grief and hurt and confusion. 

“Sorry-- I’m--” he puts his hands up, lets his hood fall down now that they’re out of sight of the immediate thoroughfare. “Sorry.”

“You’re not real,” she tells him, quiet and breaking. Her hand is trying to surreptitiously make its way into her pocket, presumably towards her phone which could be a problem for Peter.

He doesn’t need her to call the police, or SHIELD, or least of all _Tony_ and rat out his presence at this place, in this city, in this universe. 

“I really didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, as a method both of stopping any of the prior stated problem scenarios in their tracks as well as of calming her down. “I’m-- I am real though.”

“Why do you look like him?” her voice cracks. “You look like him, but-- different. Older. I don’t-- I don’t understand--”

“I’m so sorry,” Peter takes a slow step towards her, feeling the weight of her grief, the same way it had felt when he had watched her grieve Ben, listened to her finally break down and cry when she thought he had fallen asleep. “I didn’t want to-- to put you through this, it really was a coincidence that I-- I didn’t come here trying to--”

May makes a broken sort of sound as her hand comes up to cover her mouth, press tight against it as though holding something in. 

“May…” he breathes, hating himself entirely. Hating himself for putting her through this and hating the other version of him for _leaving her behind._

He hadn’t been considering that specific aspect of his anger since he woke up in this place and realized he had essentially committed suicide for sake of the universe, but he was thinking about it now. What had he been thinking, taking on a responsibility like that _knowing_ that May would be left without any of her family? 

It’s incredible, the way he can be mad at himself in multiple dimensions at a time, but Peter Parker is just talented like that. 

“You sound like him,” May says as she drops her hand. “You’re… You’re not some sort of imposter, are you? Those shapeshifters the Avengers had to deal with-- you’re not one of them.”

The uncertainty in her voice morphs over the course of those two sentences, from pure disbelief to something more akin to acceptance, and Peter is reminded of how quickly she had come to terms with Spider-Man after the initial shock had worn off. 

If May Parker knows how to do anything, it’s to take the impossible in stride. 

“You’re actually Peter,” she finishes, and Peter nods, taking an unsteady breath of his own. 

“I’m-- Um, I’m not _your_ Peter exactly,” he explains. “But, yeah,” he shrugs with a motion to himself, “Peter Parker through and through.” 

May nods, keeps nodding, tears in her eyes as the tension in her shoulders seems to release out into the air around her. 

“I’m going to hug you,” she says, already stepping towards him. “And then you’re going to explain to me what the hell is going on.”

“Okay,” Peter says through a watery laugh. And then, with her arms wrapped around him and his chin on the crown of her head, “ _Okay.”_

***

“I’m gonna kill Tony Stark.”

Peter snorts into his cup of coffee, having to actually wipe his face with a napkin that May holds out with a teasing smile before he can respond. They’re in the back room at FEAST now, since May is sort of a big deal here and can just use the back room for personal crises involving her dead nephew if she sees fit. 

“It’s not his--”

“Don’t tell me it’s not his fault,” she cuts him off. “The man knew you were here for _days_ and didn’t think it necessary to tell me. Didn’t think I ought to have the chance to see you, Peter.”

Peter tosses the now coffee-soaked napkin into a trashcan across the room and then leans back in the folding chair he’d claimed with a both physical and emotional slump. 

“I wasn’t on house arrest,” he tells her. “I could’ve reached out, I just-- I was…” he trails off, letting his head hang a little pathetically as he feels her furrow her brow at him, study him a bit harder. 

“You were what, sweetheart?” 

He digs two fingers into his eyes and huffs out a self-deprecating laugh. 

“I was scared,” he says with a shrug. “I was scared and I didn’t want you to see-- I just didn’t want to put you through more emotional trauma than you’ve already been through with your Peter. But I-- I mean, I definitely looked you up.”

May laughs softly. “I hope you only found the good stuff.”

“It’s all good stuff,” he smiles at her, lets her take his hand on top of the table, relishes in the softness of the moment. “I didn’t expect any less. I mean, look at this place, you’re-- You’ve done so much for people.”

Her face does some impressive gymnastics while she visibly holds herself together and Peter squeezes her hand when she tilts her head to the side, looks at him in that imploring way she sometimes does. 

“I had to put my love for you somewhere, didn’t I?” 

There’s no question of where she’s putting it now, all that love, because Peter can feel it piercing through all the scar tissue and the callouses that envelope the very being of his soul. It hurts and it aches and it makes him think distinctly about a living Peter Parker versus the legacy of Spider-Man. 

It makes him bounce his leg uncomfortably and look down at his shoes and laugh bitterly at himself. 

“Yeah, maybe some of us are better off as symbols,” he chokes out before he can think better of it, but it makes some of that burning warmth retreat, so at least that was something. 

“Hey there, buster,” May bites out, scowling at him when she tugs at his hand and forces him to look her in the eye. “If the universe is going to give us this chance, we’re not going to thank it by talking about ourselves like that.” 

Peter is immediately tossed back to Ned’s apartment, seeing that same indignation and hurt in May’s countenance as he internally reprimands himself for even remotely discounting what it is these people, his people in another life, have gone through. 

“I’m sorry,” he tells her earnestly, and her shoulders immediately fall. 

“I forgive you,” she responds, and it feels deeper than the conversation sitting on the surface. 

It feels approximately five years in the waiting, and although Peter knows it’s not for him, he accepts it as best he can, promises himself he’ll carry it with all the respect it deserves since his younger, more resilient counterpart cannot. 

“Are you and Tony-- Have you stayed in touch?” Peter asks out of pure curiosity. 

“He reached out a lot at the beginning,” she says. “Right after you-- after it all happened.”

 _After it all happened._ Completely different universe, completely different set of circumstances, but they still talk about it the same. 

They still don’t say it out loud. 

“He checked in on you?” Peter questions, hopeful but not completely believing it. 

May offers a small smile. “That man carries a lot of guilt,” she explains, and yeah, that makes sense. 

That makes a painful amount of sense when Peter thinks about all the times he reached out to Pepper after they lost Tony, all the times he checked in to see if he could help at all, offered his babysitting services, offered-- everything he had to give really as a teenager with considerable but undiagnosed and untreated PTSD. 

He doesn’t think too hard about the untreated part, he’s too smart not to know that it’s part of his current problem. 

“But, not anymore?” he asks hesitantly, feeling like there’s more here than she’s saying. 

“Not so much,” she shakes her head, no malice to her tone but disappointment maybe? 

Peter chews on the inside of his cheek, bites down on the meat of it and rolls it between his teeth. He doesn’t want to doubt her, but he has to make sure. 

He has to know. 

“You have people though?” he asks. “Right? You have-- You’re not alone?”

There’s no need to comment on the way she quickly swipes a finger under her eye as she lets her gaze fall for a brief moment. 

“No,” she asserts gently. “Not alone.”

“Okay, good,” Peter nods. “That’s-- that’s good. You should have people, you know? He would want you to have-- people.” 

“I do,” she assures him. “I actually… Well, I-- Oh, this is so strange,” she laughs awkwardly and Peter furrows his brow. “I’m kind of seeing someone.”

The way she says it is almost a question, and for the first time in probably all of his twenty-one years, Peter feels very nearly like she’s looking for his _approval._ Or at the very least his support. 

“Yeah?” he schools his features, trying to keep surprise out of them, trying to be whatever it is she’s looking for him to be in this moment. “They got a name?”

May’s cheeks flush as she says, “Margot,” and for a moment Peter forgets that this isn’t his May because he’s just so caught up in the way her eyes get brighter. 

“May and Margot,” he grins. “I like it.”

She makes a face. “It’s-- I mean, it’s nothing too serious. Nothing-- I’ll never replace Ben, I hope you know--”

“God, no, I-- What would make you think I meant that?” Peter frowns. 

“Oh, I don’t know.”

Peter puts it down to his spidey sense and the fact that he’s actually sober for once that he’s able to see what he sees in the twist of her lips. 

“Do you want it to be serious?” 

She takes a deep breath. She shrugs. 

“I guess I just,” she purses her lips. “I can’t quite stomach the idea of leaving Ben and-- and you behind… Of moving on like that.”

“May,” Peter breathes, not pitying but hurting. Hurting because he knows for a fact that neither himself nor Ben would want this particular sacrifice for her, would want for her to hold back on living her life just because they couldn’t be there anymore.

“I know, I know, stupid--”

“No, not stupid,” he cuts her off. “Just-- I mean, moving forward isn’t the same as moving on, y’know? You’re allowed-- I mean, you’re-- You’re _encouraged_ ,” they both laugh a little shakily. “To be happy. And if Margot makes you happy…?”

“She does,” May wipes at her eyes again, but there’s relief there now. “She really does.” 

“Well, then… I don’t want to speak for your Peter, but,” he shrugs as punctuation, knowing she understands what he means. 

“Good to know,” she exhales, before putting a bit more power back behind her voice and poking at his shoulder. “Now, what about you, young man?”

“Me?” he balks. “You wanna talk about-- my love life?”

“We talked about mine, didn’t we?” she teases. “Come on, throw an old woman a bone.” 

Peter makes a grimacing sort of face at her before he relents, feeling himself flushing pink as he flounders across a sentence. 

“Do you, um, maybe remember…” he shakes his head. “I went to high school with a girl named Michelle?”

“Michelle Jones?” May perks up. 

“She’s the one,” he laughs, pushing his hair out of his face just so he’ll have something to do with his hands. 

“You’re together?” May grins. “Oh, I-- I always thought you two would be cute. You had-- I mean, he always had just the biggest crush on her.”

“I did too,” he acquiesces, tips of his ears bright red.

“How long have you been together?” she asks eagerly, like a woman whose son had died before she ever got to have these conversations with him would. 

“We’re-- on hiatus?” he screws up his face. “We’re gonna work on it.”

“Work on what?”

“The fact that I’m not always all that great at being a partner to anyone,” he says honestly, if with a touch of self-reprimand to it. 

May hums in understanding, and Peter thinks she understands more than she’s even letting on. He thinks that one look at him and she had understood more about his current lived experience than he could ever force out in words. 

“Well, for the record,” she says. “I’m not the only one who deserves to be happy.”

  
  


***

They end up spending over two hours sitting together in the back room at FEAST before May walks him out, begins the unconscionable process of saying goodbye. 

“You’ll take care of yourself?” she implores, hand on his chest, patting twice before just letting it rest there above his heart. “You look so tired, Peter.”

The sun has dipped lower in the sky since they went inside. Nearing the end of another day in a brand new world. 

“Dimension hopping will take it outta a guy,” Peter jokes half-heartedly, but May doesn’t laugh. 

“It’s more than that though,” she gets right to the heart of it. “Right?”

Peter takes a deep breath through his nose. He lets it out slowly and turns his head, but she just lifts her hand to his cheek to make him look at her again. 

“Yeah,” he succumbs to the power of May Parker. “Yeah, I suppose so.” 

“So,” she nods definitively. “You’ll take care of yourself.”

He smiles at the way she treats it like a fact of life, as though just saying it can make it true. Perhaps it can, when she’s the one saying it. 

“I’ll do my best,” he promises. “But you have to do the same.”

May smiles at him before she pulls his head down low enough to press a kiss to the top of his hair. He wonders if it’s strange for her, the fact that he’s taller than her now. 

He stops caring when she pulls away and looks him in the eye. 

“Anything for you.” 

  
  


***

Peter is grateful for the moment to himself as he makes his way across the city back to Ned’s apartment. 

It’s a lot to absorb after all, a lot to put into perspective with where he comes from, to put into conversation with all the voices in his head that tell him day in and day out what is right and what is wrong and, ultimately, which one he’s going to choose at any given moment. 

He thinks about this May, and how she knows him, sees him just in the same way his aunt back home does, despite having gone five years without her Peter, mourning him and carrying the grief of being the last living Parker. 

It’s a testament to the universe, truly, that no matter where he goes, May Parker will know him for all that he is and love him just the same.

Peter decides, as he turns a corner and crosses a street, that he needs to get home, if only to make sure his May knows that he loves her back in spades. Doubly from what he’d been showing her, triply, infinitely more so. 

He decides this, and feels genuinely _right_ about it, settled in a properly made and justified decision, and he crosses the street, and just as he passes an alley he hears a scream. 

Because of course he does, because Peter Parker is in New York City so someone, somewhere had better be screaming, but just as he’s about to turn on his heel and run in that direction out of pure instinct, he realizes something. 

Not only is he not Spider-Man, not only does he not have his suit or his webs or a phone to call for backup if he needs it, but his face is on literal _murals_ in this city. Murals and statues and fucking textbooks that name him both a hero and a martyr, the dead child soldier of the Infinity War. 

He freezes on the outskirts of the sidewalk, hugging the brick building to his right, and pulls his hoodie down farther around his face. Restless bouncing on the balls of his feet keeps him from immediately running when he closes his eyes and tunes in his hearing, just to see if anyone else is coming, to see if maybe, in this far off world, someone has taken up the mantle of protecting New York in his stead and he won’t have to run into the fray in borrowed sweats and an aching back. 

That all goes flying out the window when he hears a voice that he’s spent the past five days working very hard to remember the intricacies of. 

_“You’ll see! You’ll all see what I can do!”_

Peter’s eyes snap open. “No way,” he mutters even as he’s already jogging back through crowds of people who are trying to get as far as possible in the opposite direction. “No way, no way, no-- _you have got to be fucking kidding me!”_

Stupid Party City wizard with their stupid purple smoke and polyester cape. And here Peter was, having a relatively good day against all odds. 

It appears as though someone is already working to get the most annoying magician of all time back on the ground as Peter chases them around a corner and down an alley-- a young girl clad head to toe in red and blue, demarcating herself from what Peter has always considered _his_ colors with a bright yellow lightning bolt plastered across her torso. 

Peter wonders, as he gets out of sight of the general public and speeds up his pace, whether or not anyone actually learned from the whole _teenage hero killed before his time_ thing or if all the articles he’d read on the subject had just been written to make themselves feel better about his death. 

“Hey, Houdini!” Peter calls out, jumping to grab onto a support beam for an adjacent fire escape and kicking out a leg that lands a blow directly in the center of their chest. “You’re annoying as hell, you know that?” 

Peter drops to the ground just as the wizard slams against a dumpster and slides to the ground. 

The teenage superhero-- that, upon closer inspection is _definitely_ a teenage superhero-- just gapes at Peter. 

“Who are _you?_ ” she asks as Peter brushes past her towards where the wizard is struggling to push themself off the ground. 

“A concerned citizen,” he deadpans. “Who are you?”

She snorts as a hand lands on Peter’s shoulder. He jumps a little, turns to brush it off (or fight it off if the situation calls for such a thing) only to find that it’s _her_ hand, armed stretched out along across the ten or so feet between them. 

She wiggles her fingers in his face while she smirks. “You’re gonna tell me you don’t recognize me?” 

Peter just gapes for a moment, stepping down on Houdini’s cape when they get unfazed enough to try and crawl away, and then saying, “I mean, that’s _dope_ as hell, like don’t get me wrong, but I’m-- not really from around here.” 

Understatement of the century, but what else was he supposed to say? 

Elastigirl Junior looks at him skeptically. “Sure.”

“And y’know, great job, rounding our wizard friend up,” he continues. “But I’ve kinda got beef to work out here, so…”

“You want me to leave you to it?” she laughs, as though it’s an absurd request. 

Without his Spidey get-up, though, Peter supposes it kind of is. Just a random guy in sweatpants and sneakers asking to be left alone with some sort of low level supervillain. 

He does really just want her to leave him to it, though, and is about to tell her as such when the cape that he’s standing on gets pulled out from underneath him unexpectedly and sends him tumbling backwards straight onto the hard ground. 

“Fucker,” Peter gasps as he pushes himself up on scraped-up palms to see the wizard putting their cape back on. So, maybe Peter was being a little lax in the absence of his webs. 

His new super-friend from another dimension runs forward and Peter watches with more than a little awe as her fist triples in size before slamming directly into the wizard’s gut, sending them flying further back into the alley through the air, but seeming to catch themselves on that weird purple mist to slow their momentum and keep hovering there. 

Peter hates to harp on it, but this would really be so much easier with his webs. Just drag Houdini to the ground and stick them there while he interrogated them about all the mysteries that his life had begun to revolve around exactly five days earlier, but that’s not an option at the moment. 

Instead, Peter ignores all of the pleas to _get out of here_ and _let me handle it_ in favor of taking a running leap onto the top of the dumpster, running a few (but not enough to look like more than impressive parkour) quick steps along the wall, and leaping onto the wizard’s back like a fucking spider monkey. 

“What the--?”

It’s both the wizard and the girl that express major confusion at this move, and even Peter is kind of in the same boat if he’s being honest, but there are answers here. There are answers that he needs if he’s going to get a handle on this truly insane, literally otherworldly event that he’s experiencing. 

So he wraps an arm around the wizard’s neck and wraps his legs around their waist and yells, perhaps a little more hysterically than intended, “Where’s the rock?! Where’s the fucking rock, Houdini?! You really fucked with my life, you know that? So just give me the--”

A blast of purple energy hits Peter _everywhere_ , from every direction, throwing him backwards off the wizard and slamming bodily sideways against the bars of a fire escape, one of which is jagged on one end and definitely leaves a long cut up the side of his abdomen. 

The other superhero present seems to have absorbed the shock of it a bit more gracefully, only skidding backwards across the gravelly concrete before stretching out her arms once more and attempting to pull the wizard to the ground. 

Peter, feeling too old and too far from home to be dealing with this, takes a bit longer than usual to pull himself to his feet. Lightning Bolt Girl is still struggling by the time he has his feet underneath him, pulling against the wizard as she dodges blasts of purple energy. 

It’s not until Peter is able to run and jump, grabbing ahold of the wizard’s feet and assisting in pulling them in a downwards motion that the two of them are able to get them to the ground. Being closer, Peter is immediately on top of them, straddling the stupid purple costume with his hands on their shoulders and face right up in theirs. 

“You have a purple-- glowing rock thing,” he says. It’s not a question. “I know you don’t know who the fuck I am, but that doesn’t matter--”

“You’re--”

“You have a weird purple rock-- stone-- whatever-- and I need it,” Peter snaps. “I need you to give it to me--”

 _“Yeah, they're down,”_ the girl is saying into some sort of comm unit off to Peter’s left, but he doesn’t have the energy or the brainpower to focus on anything but his current goal. _“But there’s-- Uh-- Something kinda weird going on. I don’t know…”_

“Do you have the rock or not?!” Peter shakes the wizard by the front of their costume, knocking their head a little bit in the process. 

And maybe Peter should know by now that big hits from magical villains always come in threes, but he’s a little preoccupied and a little not entirely in his own head because of the not entirely being in his own life thing, so he doesn’t actually see it coming when the wizard gets one of their hands free and shoves it up against Peter’s chest with a burst of energy that sends him flying across the width of the alley and whacking the back of his skull into the brick wall. 

He collapses to the ground with a harsh exhale as the wind gets knocked out of him and a groan as the gash in his side gets exacerbated and starts to bleed more heavily into the fabric of his borrowed clothes. 

Peter manages to keep conscious for long enough to see Gumby actually and properly incapacitate the wizard, but he’s taken three bodily hits at this point and so not even he is all that surprised when his vision fades to black. 

***

“Kid? Hey-- Come on, now, you little dumbass. Let’s go.” 

Peter groans, lets his head loll over to the side a little bit to avoid whatever is lightly smacking against his cheeks over and over and--

“You waking up? About time.”

Smack, smack, smack.

“Eyes open for me. I know you can do it--”

“Stop hitting me,” Peter squints as he knocks the hand that keeps tapping at his face away from him with the limited dexterity of a fresh concussion. 

It doesn’t _feel_ like it’s been more than a handful of minutes since he closed his eyes for a little back alley nap, but Peter’s probably not the most reliable judge of that. 

Maybe whoever keeps hitting him will know?

Peter rubs a hand over his face lethargically, breathing deeply as he finally cranks his eyelids open all the way, only to come face to face with--

_“Rhodey?”_

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Welcome to the land of the living.” 

“Oh God,” Peter groans some more as he adjusts where he’s sitting up against what is presumably the same brick wall that knocked him out. “I did something dumb.”

Rhodey, wearing the War Machine armor with his mask flipped up, snorts. 

“Yeah, I’ll say,” he deadpans. “You’re in some deep shit, kid.”

Peter blinks a few times, staring up at Rhodey before a puzzle piece clicks-- eyes widening slightly when he says, “Rhodey.”

Rhodey just frowns, eyes dancing across his face before he tilts his head slightly-- as if talking into a comm-- and says, “Might be some head trauma too.”

“I’m--yeah I’m definitely fucked up,” Peter admits, Rhodey blinking in surprise before cracking a smile, “but I’m just-- I mean, you’re not-- you know who I am?”

Rhodey’s expression changes then, a soft look in his eyes that reminds him of his own Rhodey once more. The Rhodey of his world had made a continuous effort to be a part of Peter’s life, even more so than Happy, after Tony died. Peter got the impression that his absence in the fallout after Beck pained him in a way that absolutely shouldn’t, something that Peter didn’t hold against anyone save for the man who tried to shoot him point blank on a bridge in London. 

Because of it, Rhodey had been intentional about connecting with Peter-- of writing a recommendation letter for him for the college he never even finished, of offering him the opportunity to train with him at the Compound that Peter took him up on less and less with over the years, of _being_ there and present-- to the point where he wondered if there wasn’t something going on between the him and May beyond just care and attention for Peter.

It was a relief, that this Rhodey wasn’t going through the same levels of shock that everyone else has but it was still a surprise-- especially since he’s not sure how his presence was explained. 

“Yeah,” Rhodey says, nodding as he lets out a laugh, “Yeah, Pete. I do. Gave Kamala a hell of a scare though.”

“He’s not-- he’s _him_? For real?” he hears who he’d previously called Elastigirl but must be the Kamala Rhodey’s referring to, say, Peter’s eyes drifting over to her and seeing the shocked but slightly awed expression on her face that he’s become a little more adjusted to. 

“Real as the back pain I’m gonna have tomorrow,” Peter mutters, Rhodey snorting as Kamala squeals-- her face lighting up even with the mask she has on as she rushes forward.

“You’re-- you’re _him_ . You’re Spider-Man? I’m-- dude, this is amazing. I’ve-- I’ve read all about you, I’ve seen like-- _every_ YouTube video and--”

“Let the man breathe,” Rhodey says gently, Kamala barely containing herself as Rhodey cracks a smile-- turning back to Peter as he says, “You got yourself a fanbase.”

“Yeah,” Peter says with a huff, still a little too dazed and too sore to really reckon with remembering the _reason_ for said fanbase, “Guess I do.”

“Back pain though? Shit, Pete you’re too young for all that,” Rhodey says, extending a hand out to help Peter up-- Kamala almost vibrating with excitement. 

“You’re-- okay so you’re clearly like, someone from another world right? Another universe? Are you from a pocket dimension? How’d you get here? What-- what are you _doing_ here?” She asks without taking a breath, Peter laughing to himself as he wipes himself down. 

He doesn’t get a chance to answer when a sleek black car drives up, throwing Peter off with the squeal of the tires-- his stomach dropping when it comes to a screeching halt in front of the alleyway they’re in, rolling down the window from the passenger side as he locks eyes with Tony Stark once again.

“Oh shit,” Peter mutters to himself, only for Tony to grit his teeth, clicking his tongue as he leans over the passenger seat. 

“Oh shit is right. Get in.” 

Peter does what he’s told, if only cause it looks as if he’s outnumbered-- in pain and still a little dazed as he limps towards the car. Rhodey closes it behind them, leaning over the passenger window as Kamala asks more questions.

“See you later, Tones.”

“Thanks, honeybear,” Tony says, tense and turning his attention back to the road. Peter looks to Rhodey, nodding before saying, “It was good to see you.”

Rhodey clears his throat, pressing his lips together before giving the kind of smile that he’s quickly grown accustomed to now-- one that’s sad and filled with grief and a reminder of just how much these people know of some version of him that doesn’t exist anymore.

“Good to see you, Pete.” 

Rhodey leans up and taps his hand against the top of the car, Tony shifting gears and driving forward-- leaving the two of them together again for the first time since Peter had left the lake house, the first time _alone_ since he’d exploded at Tony by the lake.

Peter leans his head back, closing his eyes and placing a hand over the gash on his stomach as he sighs.

 _Fuck._


	6. dissecting the bird (trying to find the song)

**  
6:17 P.M.**

  
Tony is quiet as he drives them to the Compound. 

When Peter was fifteen years old, just under a year before he turned to dust on a planet far from home, he had gotten into a bit of a scuffle on patrol and ended up with a serious enough concussion that Tony had felt the need to drag him to the Compound’s medbay and get him checked out by doctors who understood his genetic enhancements. 

Tony had been pissed at the time, and so Peter had been anxious. He had been terrified that he was going to get his suit taken away again, or that he had lost all respect from the man he had idolized for so many years. 

This feels a lot like that-- banged up in the passenger seat of one of Tony’s cars with the tinted windows and stewing in seething silence, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

The difference comes in the fact that now, no longer a teenager and with a bit more life under his belt, Peter doesn’t particularly give a shit if he gets yelled at. If Tony yells, this Peter is going to yell right back and if this Tony loses respect for him then, well, join the fucking club. 

It’s a long ride to get upstate, and it’s made longer by the fact that neither one of them seems to want to be the first one to say anything, but mutual stubbornness wins out right up until Tony is parking the car and stepping out, tossing his first words over his shoulder haphazardly. 

“You’re getting checked out in the medbay.”

It’s not a suggestion and it’s not something Peter expects to be able to dodge without unnecessary amounts of dramatics, so he just pushes his aching body out of the car and lets the door fall shut behind him. 

Tony’s already inside by the time he manages it, and Peter sighs. 

He already knows it’s about to be a long night.

**9:36 P.M.**

  
  


Helen Cho as Peter knows her is the very picture of professionalism. Which, to be fair, looks different in a hospital for superheroes than it does at your local emergicare, but that’s not the point. 

The point is that something in her cracks when she looks at Peter. 

She’s emotional while she patches him up, looks almost like she might start crying even as Peter tries to push past his own shitty mood and Tony’s hovering presence in the corner to make little quips and jokes like he normally would back home. 

They only seem to choke her up more, though, so he stops and ultimately lets her work in peace. 

Or, as much peace as could be possible considering the competing forces in the room with her. 

It’s after she leaves and Peter is gingerly trying to slip back into his shirt without pulling at any of the fresh stitches in his abdomen that Tony breaks his silence for the second time. 

“She cleaned you up after it happened. Oversaw the process of having you cremated,” he says flatly. “She didn’t want any strangers to get their hands on you-- try to study your genes, desecrate your body like that.” 

Peter gapes at him, anger growing hotter, realer. 

“And you made her come in here and _do this_ right now?” he snaps at Tony with disbelief. 

“You trust anyone else not to spread the news that Spider-Man came back to life?” Tony levels him with a look. 

Peter clicks his jaw shut, but doesn’t stop glaring at Tony. 

He really hates it when that man is right. 

  
  
  


**10:12 P.M.**

  
  


Peter’s existence is not supposed to be public knowledge, and so he’s told quite adamantly that he is not to leave Tony’s personal residence during their overnight stay at the Compound.

He’s told this by Tony himself, but Tony then immediately leaves him to his own devices, presumably so he can go complain about this nonsense to his wife or just go straight to bed and sleep off the roiling anger that Peter doesn’t even need enhanced senses to feel. 

So, Peter’s alone in some sort of den-like area, with its plush couches and armchairs and a television that Peter doesn’t bother to turn on. In fact, he doesn’t even turn most of the lights on, settling for one lamp next to the chair he’s in to bring enough of a yellow glow to a room that it’s not pitch black. 

He chose the den because it’s the farthest option from Tony’s bedroom. Also because there’s a fully stocked bar along one wall and he feels like a drink might at least put him to sleep if not actually make him feel any better. 

Case in point, there’s a glass of whiskey sitting on the coffee table in front of Peter, and although he hasn’t touched it yet, it’s also his third, so that’s not saying much. He stares at it, and he curls his legs up in the chair with his knees to his chest, and then he rests his elbows on his knees and tangles his fingers in his hair and he stares some more. 

It’s not the fact that he got in trouble that’s weighing him down. Peter Parker gets in trouble a lot, Peter Parker is very much accustomed to _being_ in trouble and making choices that he _knows_ are going to put him in further trouble with the people who, beyond all reason, still care about him. 

So, it’s not that. Not that at all. The trouble is regular, it’s the fact that it’s happening here, with people who expect more from him, that’s sending his head into foggy, messed up places where he has passing thoughts about his serious lack of worth and whether everyone’s lives are better and easier having had the chance to mourn him when he was still good rather than live with him and all this badness. 

His nails dig into his scalp, he’s considering drinking the third drink for real after ten minutes of telling himself it’s not necessary, and then the option is taken away from him. 

“What the fuck, dude?” Peter lifts his head and watches as Tony carries the whiskey across the room and pours it down the sink. 

“If you need painkillers we’ll find you some, but this isn’t how we’re gonna do it,” Tony replies flatly, leaving the glass in the bottom of the basin and leaning back against it with his arms crossed to level Peter with a dissatisfied sort of tilt to his eyebrows. 

“You don’t really get any say in how I do it, though,” Peter snaps. “Do you?”

“So long as you’re fucking around in my world like you did tonight, I think I do, actually,” Tony fires right back at him. 

“I handled the situation!” Peter throws his hands up, lets his knees fall to the sides so he’s sitting criss-crossed in his chair now. “The situation is handled because I was there. Would you have rathered I stayed out of it? Just let it happen?”

“I would’ve rathered you let someone else handle it!” Tony is meeting Peter right at his level, and it’s been a while since he’s gotten into a proper verbal sparring match with _anyone_ let alone someone with as sharp a tongue as Tony, but Peter has no plans to back down. 

“You think I’m wasting my life one minute and then when I do something _useful_ you’re-- you’re--”

“You could’ve gotten hurt a hell of a lot worse than you did tonight, Pete,” Tony cuts him off. “You could’ve gotten _killed._ Do you get that?” 

“Oh, come on,” Peter scoffs. 

“Okay, apparently you don’t, so let me tell you,” Tony says flatly but with feeling. “ _You could have died tonight, Peter.”_

“Every time I put on the suit, I could die,” Peter says. “It’s part of the gig and you know that.”

“But you weren’t in the suit tonight!” Tony exclaims. “You’re not even in your own fucking universe right now. And what happens if you die here? If you leave everyone back home questioning what happened to you and never getting an answer because you were reckless? I know what it's like to lose you, kid, and I can tell you it’s not fun.” 

“I might not get back there regardless,” Peter runs a hand over his face. “You might be stuck with me, _Mister Stark.”_

He spits it out like an insult and he sees that it hits where it’s meant to, right in the center of Tony’s chest. 

It’s an echo of a thing, that name, an entire person that they’ve both grieved in their own ways, and it doesn’t belong in this room. But neither does Peter. 

“God, I resent you right now,” Tony shakes his head slowly. “And you know what? I resent them a little bit too,” he continues. “I resent that they have you and they’ve let you fuck yourself over like this--”

“Hey!” Peter stands up, aggressive in ways he hates to be, ways he never is. “This is _not_ their fault and if you so much as suggest--”

“No, it’s _your_ fault,” Tony tells him, all that self-assuredness making Peter’s blood boil. 

“Fuck you,” Peter bites out tiredly, but Tony just stands straighter, takes a step closer. 

“I’m serious,” he says. “I’ve spent less than a week with you and I can see it-- the anger, the unresolved trauma, all this bullshit that you’re refusing to acknowledge--”

“I am well aware of the bullshit,” Peter deadpans. 

“Then why are you carrying it around instead of fucking dealing with it?” Tony hits back quick and without hesitation. 

Peter crosses his arms tight enough to feel it in his biceps, chews on the inside of his cheek. Something about the lack of response softens Tony but it only infuriates Peter further when he speaks up next and it's a quiet breath of a thing instead of the yelling. He’s earned the yelling, someone should have been yelling at him this whole damn time. 

“Kid,” Tony exhales instead, worry leaching out of just that word alone. “Have you talked to _anyone_ about how you’re feeling? Have you said it out loud even once?”

Peter thinks about May, and he thinks about Ned and MJ. He thinks about Harry fucking Osborn who could’ve been a friend and about Pepper and Rhodey and the rest of them. He thinks about every _just checking in_ text and every poorly hidden look of concern and every dinner he’s bailed out on for whatever sad excuse he was using that week. 

He thinks about the fact that through it all, he has never truly given them an honest answer. Peter has to protect them after all, from this person he’s become. 

“Look,” Tony continues, undeterred by Peter’s silence, maybe seeing something in him as he comes to conclusions inside his own head. “I may not be the same Tony Stark that you clearly need to have it out with, but I’m the one that’s here and I’m the one that’s genuinely scared that if you don’t put all this shit you’re feeling somewhere it’s gonna fucking kill you. So let’s lay it out, huh?” 

Peter’s face contorts and he cocks his head to the side out of sheer disbelief. 

“What?” he asks. “Are you asking to be some sort of-- emotional punching bag right now?”

“Not asking,” Tony explains. “We’re not leaving this place until you’ve said some of this stuff out loud. Got it?” 

“I don’t…”

Peter trails off as he watches Tony sit down on the couch across from him, prop his feet up, and look at Peter expectantly. Unsure how to grapple with this development, Peter sits down carefully in his own chair, uncertainty in the set of his shoulders and the wrinkle of his brow. 

“Alright,” Tony says with a wry grin. “Where do you wanna start?” 

  
  


**10:46 P.M.**

“It’s not that fucking deep!” Peter yells with his hands as much with his voice. It’s been thirty minutes and he already knows he’s going to be hoarse by the end of the night. 

“It’s your future! It’s you deciding to throw away--”

“Oh, shut up,” Peter cuts him off glibly. “It’s college-- it’s just _school_ and I could go back anytime if it was what I needed--”

“Then why don’t you?” Tony is standing behind the couch now, and grips the back of it with stiff knuckles. “Because you obviously need to be doing something other than taking pictures for a fucking tabloid--”

“Maybe I like taking pictures for a fucking tabloid!”

“And maybe I don’t fucking believe you!”

It’s going to be a long night, Peter thinks, as he resists picking up an unlit candle from a side table and chucking it at Tony’s head.

  
  


**11:24 P.M.**

  
  


“I assume you called Pepper already?”

“Yeah,” Tony says, hints of anger still tugging at his words. “She was worried about you, you know.”

Peter lets out a huff of air through his nose in some mimicry of a laugh. 

“She doesn’t even know me,” he says, bitterness in his voice not directed at Pepper, this one or the one back home, but instead at himself for any number of unnamable reasons. 

Tony just looks at him. 

“You’d be surprised.” 

  
  


**11:57 P.M.**

“I can’t believe,” Tony says, laying flat on his back on the couch and staring at the ceiling while Peter pours them each a glass of water at the bar. “That you take _selfies_ and sell them to a gossip rag.” 

“I do more than take selfies,” Peter responds over his shoulder. They’ve stopped yelling and they technically left this conversation behind thirty minutes ago, but apparently Tony is finding it amusing now instead of maddening so they’re back at it. “I also shoot, like, career fairs and shit.”

Tony props himself up on his elbows and just _looks_ at Peter. 

“What now?” Peter says defensively as he sets the waters down on the coffee table and sits back in his chair. 

“Career fairs?” Tony deadpans in response. 

“Yes?” Peter furrows his brow in confusion. 

“You really don’t see the irony?” Tony’s holding back laughter now. 

And when Peter really thinks about it he does, but he snorts at Tony nonetheless, and rolls his eyes to double the effect, slouching back in his chair as he does so. 

“I’m not gonna find my new path in life at a high school career fair,” he says the words like he’s throwing them out. 

“Ah,” Tony grins, sitting up to grab his glass of water. “But you admit you need to find one!” 

He takes a sip while Peter hits him with a look. 

“I spit in that.”

Tony sputters. 

  
**12:42 A.M.**

They’re technically into a new day now, and Peter isn’t sure what the cut-off point, the goal that Tony is looking to reach entails, so he has no idea how far off they are from actually attaining it. 

He feels calmer, if still too riled up to actually sleep, but exhausted despite the fact that they’ve barely even scratched the surface. Peter has so much to say, but this still isn’t the man he needs to say it to, even if he does share his face and a good chunk of his memories. 

But maybe Pepper had been right, in that whispered argument in the cabin’s kitchen, when she had told Tony this was an opportunity for them. And maybe Peter should just accept it for being that. 

“You got quiet,” he says breaking what feels like a longer stretch of silence that it probably actually was. 

Tony hums out a sound of acknowledgment. 

“I’m just thinking about this lyric that I heard-- a long time ago,” he replies, all slumped back in the couch in a sign of how long they’ve both been awake. 

“A lyric?” Peter lifts an eyebrow. He’s on the floor now, back up against the chair behind him with one leg up and one sprawling out in front of him. 

“Yeah,” Tony chuckles. “Y’know, I can’t remember how it goes or who sings it but I-- I look at you... Pete, I look at you and I just keep thinking-- you’ve gone and convinced yourself that if you dissect the bird in just the right way you’re gonna find the song. Just sitting inside somewhere, waiting for you.”

Peter furrows his brow, incapable of dissecting any of _that_ for the moment, instead letting out a baffled, “What?” in lieu of a more dignified response. 

Tony levels a look at him, lets out a heavy breath, and then leans forward to put his elbows on his knees and his face more at level with Peter’s eyes. 

“It means you’re going about it all entirely wrong,” he says. “You’re-- I mean, I dunno exactly what you think you’re doing, but from where I’m sitting it’s like-- you think you can cut open your life and watch it bleed out and if you dig around in the carnage enough you’ll find something worth loving, but that’s not how it works!” he laughs with a hint of disbelief that makes Peter feel just on the edge of defensive again, like he’s going to have to justify himself to this man for the umpteenth time in this night alone. 

“I’m not-- slashing my life apart,” Peter pushes back against Tony’s line of reasoning, maybe because he really doesn’t agree or maybe because that’s just the most comfortable way to have a conversation with him. “This is just what it is-- who I am, y’know? Sucks that he’s not what you all had in mind, but it’s what’s happened.”

“Because you had no control over that?” Tony challenges. “You had no say in who Peter Parker was gonna be? Kid, this shit doesn’t just happen out of nowhere.”

“Yeah, no right, it doesn’t,” Peter stands up and paces around behind the armchair because he needs to move, can’t sit still, can barely even look at Tony because it’s all so surreal and difficult and nauseating. “It doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. It happens-- it happens when bad shit becomes inevitable, when you finally realize that the bad shit is going to _keep_ happening because that’s your lot in life, when everyone who loves you doesn’t just die but leaves behind all these expectations that are impossible to meet!” he’s raising his voice now, and he’s ramping up towards screaming, but Tony is watching him with steady eyes that only ratchet up his anger. 

“It happens when your parents die in a tragic accident and everyone promises that you’ll make them proud, even though you’re seven years old and that’s not their promise to make,” Peter continues fiercely. “And it happens when even though you’ve spent years trying to make them proud, you end up getting your uncle killed anyway-- because good grades and scholarships to fancy STEM schools don’t mean shit when you’re still a fucking coward--

“And it happens when you try to carry on that man’s legacy, because he was a good man, a better man than you’ll ever be, but just end up getting it wrong-- again and again and _again_ until finally it happens all over again,” Peter yells with tears clogging up his throat but refusing to spill down his cheeks quite yet. “And the man you thought maybe you could finally do right by goes and sacrifices himself-- _sacrifices_ himself so you have to live with yet another person whose legacy you can never hope to carry. _That’s_ how you get to where I am, Tony. None of that was my choice.” 

Tony’s quiet for a moment, and Peter tries to catch his breath so he doesn’t end up bursting into tears because he thinks if he starts now he may very well never stop. And then Tony releases a slow breath, and he unclenches his jaw, and he speaks up. 

“I can’t speak for your parents, or for Ben,” he says. “But I never meant to pressure you--”

Peter cuts him off with a bitter, too-loud, aching burst of laughter. He has to lift a hand to cover his mouth as it goes on too long, too hysterical, too _much_ while Tony just watches him, a bit more defensive in his own posture now too. 

“What’s so funny?” he asks and Peter shakes his head before responding with a shrug and a spat-out, “EDITH.”

Tony’s face falls just enough that Peter can see the feeble hope that they might step around this particular conversation crack right down the middle. 

“Yeah,” Peter exhales with a flat, bitter smirk. “Yeah, you pulled that shit here too, right? _Even Dead I’m the Hero--_ Christ.” 

“In the event that something happened--”

“It super did--”

“I wanted you to be _protected!”_ Tony exclaims over Peter’s comment and Peter is almost relishing in making him angry because he should be, because Peter is angry too. 

“Did you leave a note with yours?” Peter asks, still pushing buttons he’s always been too guilty to vocalize. “ _To the next Iron Man-- I trust you._ The next Iron Man!”

“Peter--”

“Do you not get how fucked up that was for me?” Peter motions broadly with his hands, lets his fist press hard into his own sternum. “The next Iron Man as if-- As if you didn’t save the whole damn universe with a literal snap of your fingers and I wasn’t-- _sixteen years old!_ Sixteen years old and I just wanted to go on a date with the girl I really liked but you thought it was a good idea to go ahead and put that in my head-- _Never meant to pressure,_ my ass.” 

“I didn’t exactly have a lot of people left that I could trust with something like that,” Tony says and Peter scoffs. 

“Your trust in me-- which I didn’t know existed until you were dead as a doornail, by the way,” Peter shoots back. “That trust almost got all my friends and half of _Europe_ killed, Tony!” 

“Didn’t know existed?” Tony zeroes in on _that_ of all things. “You think I give state-of-the-art super suits to people I don’t _trust?”_

“I think you give them to children when you’re desperate--”

“You have no idea--”

“I have _every_ idea--”

“After all I did for you, kid--”

“Don’t fucking _call me kid!”_

It echoes in the space, accompanied only by the sound of heavy breathing in Peter’s ringing ears. 

He could stop, he could step back, he could use the opportunity to slow down their fatal velocity. 

He doubles down. 

“I’m twenty-one years old and I’m not your _fucking kid,”_ he snaps. “I’m not this pure, teenage martyr that you’ve got in your head, I’m not wholesome or angelic or infallible, and I wasn’t even any of that when I was sixteen either! I’m-- I’m just a _person._ I just need you to see me as a fucking _person,_ Tony.” 

For his part, Tony looks gobsmacked, absolutely slapped in the face by this development. He’s quiet for a moment before he manages to string a sentence together.

“I’ll stop calling you kid,” he says. 

“Well, golly gee, thanks so much, Mister Stark,” Peter replies with flat mockery before he can think better of it.

“Don’t do that,” Tony says, not sharply or angrily so much as just, simply, tired of it all. Peter can relate, which is why he sighs so heavily. 

“Sorry.”

“Five minute break?” Tony suggests. 

“Five minute break.” 

  
  
**1:36 A.M.**

  
  


“You’re kidding!” Tony cackles, head thrown back and everything.

“I’m not,” Peter shakes with his own wracking laughter. “I swear I’m not-- I-- The guy literally decides his look is gonna be Barney Wizard but doesn’t understand a Houdini reference?”

It’s not that funny, but it’s past one in the morning and they’ve both had a hell of a week and Peter may be pretty much sober by now but he thinks the two of them have gone and gotten punch drunk on the heightened emotions of the evening. 

Tony teases Peter about the way his sarcasm has evolved and Peter laughs boisterously in response instead of finding a reason to get defensive. In return, Tony laughs when Peter starts making dark jokes about their mirrored death sentences and even makes a few right back at him. 

They keep laughing about it for thirty minutes before it stops being funny. 

  
  


**2:09 A.M.**

  
  


“I can’t believe my daughter helped you sneak out, by the way.”

They had found a bag of pretzels under the bar and eat messy handfuls straight out of the bag. 

Peter snorts out a few crumbs. “I can,” he laughs self-deprecatingly. 

“What’s that mean?” Tony frowns at him, and Peter hurriedly back-peddles. 

“Not because she’s a bad kid,” he explains. “Just because, you know, she doesn’t like me very much.”

“What?” now Tony’s defensive frown is turning into one of pure and unadulterated confusion, which would be funny if it wasn’t so exasperating. “She adores you, are you kidding me? She’s been hearing about the heroics of Spider-Man since she could _hear.”_

Peter shoots him a look across the coffee table. “Yeah,” he says in deadpanned agreement. 

“Don’t be cryptic when we’re talking about my daughter,” Tony says in a no-nonsense sort of way that reminds him of _zip it, the adult is talking._

It makes his spine straighten, even though he knows it’s an irrational reaction. 

He does what he’s told and tells the truth anyway, though. 

“You just-- You’re making my point for me, is all,” he shrugs. “She’s had these stories of the teenage savior hanging over her head her entire life.”

“Yeah, but--”

“Tony,” Peter laughs as he cuts him off. “What was it like when you met Steve Rogers for the first time?” 

A deeper furrow, followed by stark understanding, but Peter just keeps going. 

“She’s grown up with this ghost of a hero in her house-- literally in her family photos on the walls,” he says. “I mean, not to compare myself to Captain America here, but, that final snap is for her what the plane crash in the arctic was for you.” 

Tony chews on that, and then he lets out a harsh laugh. 

“If you had anyone else’s face I might just hit you for comparing me to my father,” he says glibly. 

“You still can if you want,” Peter offers casually. 

“For what?” Tony levels him with a look. “Being right?” 

“It doesn’t happen very often,” Peter chuckles. “We should mark the occasion _somehow.”_

“How about you just tell me how to fix it instead,” Tony rolls his eyes. 

“As if I’d know better than you?” Peter balks.

“You _are_ the one that saw it, Sigmund.” 

“Yuck,” Peter pulls a face, but Tony just watches him expectantly, waiting for _what_ Peter isn’t entirely sure. At least, not until it hits him. 

_People are more complicated than stories._

“I mean,” he cracks his knuckles absentmindedly, one at a time. “If I were her, I’d wanna know that this hero was still a guy, right? Like, he messed up. A lot. Tell her about that-- the kid that tried his best but still made mistakes.”

“You think?” Tony asks sincerely and Peter nods. 

“Yeah,” he responds. “Tell her-- I dunno-- the ferry story. Or about Homecoming night. Or-- Hah-- About that time I got myself locked in a DODC storage facility and had to use a graphing calculator to get out.”

“I’m sorry, you did _what--”_

Oops. Maybe not everything played out the same here after all.   
  


**2:39 A.M.**

“I have a topic I’d like to bring to the table.”

“What’s that?” Peter asks. He’s standing again, leaning up against the floor-to-ceiling window and looking out at the grounds half the time, looking back at Tony the other half. 

Right now he’s looking at Tony, because Tony’s looking at him like _that._

“The booze,” he says frankly, but still gentle. “I’d like for us to talk about the booze.” 

It’s something that Peter had expected to show up earlier on in the night, that he had been hoping as the hours wore on that maybe Tony had either decided wasn’t worth it, or had forgotten about altogether. 

But Peter isn’t that lucky. 

“It’s not as big of a deal as I’ve made it sound,” he sighs, arms crossed as he slumps a little against the glass. It’s going to be smudged in the morning. 

“Is it not?” Tony asks skeptically. “How much did you have to drink before I came in here and poured that glass down the drain?” 

Peter must make a face that clearly reads as _how did you know that?_ because Tony looks right back at him like he’s an idiot. 

“You think that I couldn’t tell?” he deadpans. “Seriously, if I hadn’t been able to smell it I still would’ve been able to see it and hear it.”

Peter drops his chin to his chest, jaw clenched tight. But it’s not out of anger anymore, this time all of his defensive posture and deflection by way of avoiding eye contact has zero of the aggression of earlier in the night, swapping it out for overwhelming shame. 

Humiliation, that genius Peter Parker could be so stupid as to let something like this take ahold of him. 

“I really don’t want to talk about this,” he mumbles, opting to give his tired body a break by sliding down the glass to sit on the floor. 

Tony doesn’t respond, and Peter knows that type of silence, knows that it means Tony is genuinely contemplating his next move rather than flying on instinct alone. It was a rare moment when Peter experienced this type of silence in high school, and it catches him off guard, but not as much as when Tony stands up a few lengthy moments later and crosses the room to sit down next to Peter. 

Back up against the glass and shoulder just a few inches away, it’s the closest they’ve been since Tony drove him here, except this time the fierce anger has faded. It makes it more bearable, if not still shrouded in an aching grief that mingles between the two of them. 

“When you died on Titan,” Tony finally speaks up, looking at Peter’s face despite Peter’s insistence to keep his gaze steadily forward. “I drank my body weight in scotch. Because I had let you down, and I didn’t know how to forgive myself for it.”

Peter wants to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he feels like that’s not the point of this story, so he just pulls his knees up to his chest so he can have someplace to rest his chin. 

“I went on about a month-long bender,” Tony continues. “And then Pepper found out she was pregnant and I should’ve stopped but I couldn’t. Because how was I supposed to protect a _baby_ when I couldn’t even protect the smartest fucking kid I’ve ever met?” 

Peter’s jaw trembles, he covers it up with a wry grin. “Morgan’s smarter.”

“Yeah,” Tony laughs softly. “But to be fair, she _is_ a Potts.” 

The grin turns a bit more genuine at that, at having the chance to recall that Tony Stark loved Pepper Potts with his whole entire being. He’d have to remind her when he got home. If he got home. 

“I got it under control enough that I wasn’t drunk twenty-four-seven,” Tony continues. “But I still drank more than an expecting father should have, still missed more doctor’s appointments than I should have, still was-- absent in ways I won’t ever stop regretting…”

He trails off for a beat, and Peter lets him gather himself because it’s not like he particularly wants to add his two cents. In fact, it’s the last thing he wants, to have to say, out loud, all of the ways that he has let people down for far too similar of reasons. 

“The point is, I didn’t stop drinking until after Morgan was born,” Tony runs a tired hand through his hair. “And it was hard, and sometimes it still is hard, but if I can do it…”

He trails off, leaves space open for Peter to respond. He does, but probably not in the way he’s meant to. 

“I don’t go on benders,” he says, and it’s not sharp or defensive because it’s actually, technically the truth, but it earns him a bit of a look out of the corner of Tony’s eye nonetheless. 

“Sure,” he says. “But you drink when things get too hard to handle, and that’s not what I would call a healthy coping mechanism.” 

Peter works his jaw, slumps in on himself somehow further. 

“I dunno about where you’re from,” Tony goes on, seeming to know that Peter isn’t fighting anymore but also isn’t ready to verbally respond. “But here, people like to try and compare us a lot.”

Peter breathes in sharply and lets it out on a sigh. “Yeah,” he agrees wryly. 

“They’re wrong most of the time,” Tony shrugs. “But I think in this case? With the self-destructive tendencies as means of punishment for something that’s not your fault? That might be a bit more on-the-nose than I would like… And look, I know I don’t know _you--_ you were right about that much, but I do know Peter Parker.”

Peter scoffs. “Okay…”

“No, listen,” Tony insists, going forth to tell him exactly what he knows. “Peter Parker wakes up every day with the weight of the fucking world on his shoulders. And I don’t know if he was born that way, or if somewhere along the line he just started picking up other people’s strifes and not putting them back down, but either way he puts that super strength through the wringer just getting out of bed. 

“And the Peter Parker I knew was only a kid-- He was young enough that it was hard to see the way it was accumulating,” Tony continues. “But the older he gets, the harder it’s gonna get. Heavier. Impossible, even, if he never relents and puts some of it down.”

Peter presses his face into his knees, hides himself under his arms like a child, because he feels like one. He feels small and he feels vulnerable and translucent and there are tears of exhaustion and _feeling_ pricking at his eyes that he doesn’t want to let fall. 

“Please stop,” he begs, but Tony’s never been one to listen when he’s already on a roll. 

“Peter Parker has this idea in his head that he’s not allowed to put it down, that he has to carry all of it for the rest of time,” he says. “But that’s not his job, and he’s far from the only one capable of carrying that shit, and quite frankly it’s self absorbed of him to think otherwise--”

_“Tony--”_

“Peter Parker is not a lost cause,” Tony places a hand on the nape of Peter’s neck, forces him to turn his head and look him in the eye. “You hear me? He’s got a lot of messed up ways of thinking that he needs to work out, and he’s gonna need to suck it up and _talk_ to some people in order to do that; he’s gonna need to stop binge drinking and he’s gonna need to put a little bit of structure back into his life. But he’s _not_ a lost cause.”

Tony’s eyes are so certain, so earnest, so forthcoming in his belief of every word he’s just let leave his mouth, and Peter can feel something inside of him finally crack. Years of built-up scar tissue holding him together and finally, _finally_ it just. Tears. Snaps. Leaves him choking out an involuntary sob of a breath. 

Peter lets Tony pull gently at the base of his skull, lets him hold Peter’s forehead to his shoulder in a comforting gesture that’s nearly a hug but not quite there yet. 

For his own part, Peter lets himself cry. 

  
  


**3:12 A.M.**

“I’m sorry,” Peter breathes, curled up in his chair in such a way that will leave him with sore joints and muscles in the morning if he falls asleep like this. “For not turning out the way I should have.” 

“Oh, Pete,” Tony shakes his head, legs stretched out on the couch. 

They hadn’t moved back to their separate positions in the room until Peter had gotten control of his lungs once more, until Tony had made him drink a glass of water and blow his nose on a cocktail napkin. 

But they were back in their seats, and although they had put physical distance back between themselves it still felt different. Less forced. 

“I’m serious,” Peter insists, although quieter than most of his insistances have been this night. 

“I know, but,” Tony exhales a breath of a laugh. “God, I’m sorry for making you feel like you had to turn out in any specific way.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tony replies certainly. “‘Cause listen-- If I had the choice between losing that-- idealized version of you that I’ve gone and concocted or-- or _having_ you like this. Grown up and flawed and messy, but still Peter Parker... Underoos, I’d choose having you every goddamn time.” 

A slow breath, sinking deeper into the cushions. 

“Thank you,” Peter says earnestly. 

“Yeah,” Tony nods. “Just, you know, try for me, would you? Give me that much?” 

Peter offers up a small, acquiescent sort of smile. He knows that it’s more complicated than that, but he also knows that _Tony_ knows that, which is why his request isn’t _be better_ or _be good_ or _make me proud._

His request is simply to try. 

“Promise,” Peter tells him. And it doesn’t feel like a lie. 

  
  


**8:11 A.M.**

The next morning when Peter wakes up, he still feels like shit.

He hadn’t expected to feel _lighter_ exactly, but he didn’t expect to still feel so emotionally and physically spent-- to the point where when he stumbles to the bathroom and splashes water all over his face, there’s a part of him that wonders what was the point.

In his wildest dreams, he never imagined the chance to be able to talk to Tony like they had last night-- _really_ talk, even if the result ended up entirely too focused on him and his fucked up problems than anything that he really wanted to know. 

Peter dries his face off with the absurdly nice towels, shuffles out of the bathroom and out of the room they were in-- hearing the sound of a pan sizzling in the background and following the smell of food as he shuffles forward.

He’s either not been in this section of the Compound or it’s just another change that he wasn’t around to see, the open living area billowing out to a small kitchenette that looks cozy as Tony looks back at him from his position at the stove.

“You’re up. Perfect timing,” Tony says, turning around as Peter holds back a laugh at what he’s seeing-- _Iron Man_ portioning out an inhuman amount of eggs onto a plate, a plate that already has a massive stack of pancakes and what looks like a pack of bacon. “Was gonna poke you with a stick if you didn’t wake up.”

Peter snorts, slides onto the bar stool that’s across from him as he watches Tony who is now putting a smaller, more respectable portion of eggs onto another plate as he nods and asks, “You’re making breakfast?”

Tony looks up and over his glasses, making a face before saying, “You really didn’t pay a lot of attention back at the lake house did you? I cooked every meal, Pete.”

“Oh,” Peter says, taking the plate of food that Tony offers him, only to snort-- seeing an easy joke as he studies the plate.

“What?” 

“You know I’m Jewish right?” Peter asks with a smirk, looking back to see Tony fucking Stark look absolutely gobsmacked-- a look that’s so infrequent and so rare that it actually makes Peter laugh as he watches Tony _physically_ shift his attention from Peter to the plate and back to Peter.

“Shit. Pete, I’m-- I’m sorry, I didn’t--”

“It’s okay,” Peter says with a laugh, taking the fork and knife that had already been placed on the bar, “I don’t keep kosher.”

“Right,” Tony says, looking a little defeated-- as if it was some personal failing to _forget_ that Peter was Jewish, staring down at the plate as Peter takes a massive bite.

“Th’nks,” Peter says with a garbled mouth, chewing his food and swallowing before Tony finally snaps out of it, “for breakfast.”

“Yeah, yeah no problem, Pete. I-- yeah,” Tony says, sounding uncharacteristically flustered, Peter eyeing him carefully but choosing not to press it-- not when the smell of the food in front of him is too enticing and his stomach is growling because he hadn’t eaten anything since the pizza before he left Ned’s.

It falls into a not quite comfortable silence as Peter eats and Tony moves his food around, distracted that when Peter’s finally made headway on the tower of pancakes that it looks more like a hill that he says, “You good?”

Tony blinks a few times and looks up at him, clicking his tongue before saying, “Yeah. Never better.”

“Sorry, for uh-- joking about the bacon,” Peter begins, feeling awkward less because he feels he needs to apologize for his identity but for the weirdness that’s settled over Tony’s face only for Tony to frown and shake his head.

“No--Pete, you don’t have to apologize for—“

“I _should_ probably keep kosher, Ben did and I just--”

“Seriously, Pete you’re not--”

“I don’t expect you too--”

“I forgot.”

Peter pauses, feeling the weight in his words-- the heaviness and the familiarity of it until it finally clicks as Tony averts his eyes away from Peter, gripping the fork in his hand a little tighter as he pushes around some eggs.

“I forgot,” Tony repeats, “that you were Jewish.”

“It’s okay--” Peter begins, only to be cut off when Tony laughs.

“It’s not. I--” Tony closes his eyes, Peter feeling now as if he’s intruding on a private moment-- of a moment between Tony and himself sure but Tony and someone else, another ghost in the room that Peter had let himself forget for a second was always present. 

It was weird as fuck to be sitting in the Avengers Compound, body feeling sore and the slight vestiges of a headache still pressing on the back of his mind-- eating breakfast that Tony Stark had made for him.

It hits him again-- in a way that it really shouldn’t considering the circumstances-- that this was just as weird for Tony too. 

Peter had known Iron Man his whole life, tangentially before he did personally-- still remembering the YouTube clips of seeing him out his identity to journalists, of remembering what it felt like when the Battle of New York raged outside their windows and learning later that _Iron Man_ had been the one to save them even then. 

Getting to actually _know_ the man behind the mask, even for as briefly and as shallow as it felt at the time, was just filling in pieces of what Peter already knew-- a compare and contrast of the Tony Stark the public got to see and the Tony Stark who yammered on endlessly about photons in the lab. 

Sitting here, now, watching as Tony grits his teeth together-- he’s reminded that for as famous as the Peter Parker of this world is now, for as much as the entire _world_ knows about the details of his life, the Tony Stark of this world had that much less information to go on from the beginning. 

Tony Stark had mourned for Peter Parker for longer than he had ever known him. Of course, the same man made it his personal mission to know everything that he could about whatever-- or _whoever_ \-- was in front of him, would it take it personally that he forgot something like this about _him_. 

“It’s been a long time,” Peter finally says when it’s clear that Tony has nothing more to give, feeling awkward but not uncomfortable as Tony finally looks back up at him-- looking as if he was either deep in thought or desperately trying not to cry as he swallowed something in his throat.

“Yeah,” Tony finally says with a laugh that’s a little too shaky to believe it to be real, “Yeah, it has.”

“If it uh, makes you feel any better,” Peter begins, still a little too punch drunk from the emotions and how raw everything had felt between them last night, “I don’t remember a lot of stuff about you either.” 

Tony levels him with a look that is filled with disbelief, Peter amending, “I mean the important shit. You know the-- I didn’t--”

Peter sighs, scrambling to try and articulate what he’s saying and a little too tired to still accurately describe it as he says, “The _real_ stuff you know? I don’t-- there’s a lot of stuff I don’t remember or I just… I didn’t know.”

Whatever Peter’s intentions were, it doesn’t have the intended effect-- Tony just staring at him carefully and with just enough sadness that it makes Peter uncomfortably aware of his own as Tony’s expression changes again, sucking his teeth as he shakes his head.

“Time was never really on our side huh?”

“No, I guess not,” Peter says, tapping his fingers lightly against the counter and looking down-- blinking a few times to force himself not to think of all the things he missed out on knowing of his Tony, of all the years they could’ve getting to know each other, of the husband and the father that was taken from the world-- not just the hero. 

He forces himself to look back at Tony and sees in his eyes that he gets it-- that Tony is thinking all the same things but about Peter. Of a kid who won intergalactic renown but never even got to graduate from high school. Of a kid who was too brave and too stupid and too _young_ that even if that Peter had fully understood the consequences of his decision, that it still couldn’t relieve the insurmountable guilt and grief of the man before him who had to watch him die twice-- of all the people in Peter’s life who lived every day in this world with the knowledge that they never had the chance to say goodbye. 

It’s an unspoken truth that Peter knows all too well in his own life, from all the losses he’s ever faced both as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, that it didn’t matter what villain of the week showed up-- didn’t matter what the problem was or what the issue was that needed to be fixed, didn’t matter if the cause was as simple as miscommunication or as complex as a genocidal Titan with infinity stones.

In the end, the only real villain is time. 

***

It shouldn’t surprise Peter that no revelation would ever go unpunished.

The two of them are just barely finishing their breakfast, quiet and melancholy and just the right touch of bittersweet as they talked as frankly as the time of the morning could give them when Peter startles-- sparks of yellow and gold all swirling around in the space between them.

“Fuck,” Peter mutters, taking a step back just as a portal opens-- Stephen Strange stepping through it as Tony sighs behind him. 

“We have a front door,” Tony deadpans but Strange ignores him, turning his attention to Peter-- the room growing silent when he says words that for four days he’s wanted to hear and now he can't help but _feel_ irony in them being spoken to him now. 

“I can get you home.”


	7. this is the moment of truth

“So it’s the Power stone?” Peter asks, as Tony frowns.

“That’s not possible,” Tony begins, folding his arms together. “Infinity stones are destroyed. Or well,” he nods his head, “the ones we had returned back to their timelines.”

“Correct, there are no Infinity Stones since they were destroyed on Titan by Thanos himself,” Strange says, Peter catching the way Tony clenches his jaw from the mention of Thanos. 

“But you’re saying it’s like a— a what, freaky Friday cousin?” Peter asks again, Strange moving his hands to recreate an image of the stone that had sent him here— holding his hand up and twisting it around.

“The Infinity Stones were here from the dawn of creation. Many have tried and failed to wield them to their own ends, but even more have tried to recreate them. In the instance of the Power Stone, it was especially attractive for the energy that it gave to the beholder.”

Strange moves his hand so the recreation dissolves as he says, “ _ These _ have existed throughout the millennia, or so they were rumored. I’d never come across such a powerful imitation nor would have thought to look, till you mentioned it.”

“So how’d an ancient knock off of one of the most powerful sources of energy to ever exist end up in the hands of some wizard dude in a Party City cape?” Tony asks, Peter holding back a smirk as Strange frowns.

“That man was no  _ wizard _ and in the time since his capture has been reticent in giving information. However, a search of his apartment found this—“ Strange brings up another image, only for Peter to take a step back when his senses go off in the back of his neck, realizing that the image wasn’t an image at all but rather the stone itself.

“How did— is that it?” Peter asks, eyes staying focused on the stone as the purple light pulses from it.

“Indeed. With the right intonation, it should pull you back to the world that you came from.”

“Wait, time out,” Tony interjects as the elevator doors ding, “should? It  _ should  _ work? No, we’re not working with should’s anymore when—”

“Stark—” Strange begins, Peter turning to the voice who calls out from the elevator.

“Is everything alright?” Pepper asks, Tony looking over to her as he asks, “Pep? Where’s Mo—”

“With Happy,” Pepper supplies, walking towards them as she seems to read the situation— Peter seeing her transform more to the businesswoman that  _ he  _ knows as she continues, “I wanted to check in and see how things were going. You didn’t answer your phone and—”

“I’m sorry,” Tony immediately apologizes, Pepper smiling as Tony motions towards Strange, “I should’ve— I just, wait a minute. Let me get this straight, you’ve spent the past five days researching this and all you can do is  _ should _ ?”

“Stark, once again, you fail to understand the intricacies of—”

“I don’t give a shit about—”

“Why don’t we all just take a moment,” Pepper says with the same kind of ease that she used to smooth things over in his own world, “Stephen, would you mind explaining a little more for me what’s going on?”

Peter watches Pepper as she listens, a little in awe of how easily she fits into all of this and how much of an instant effect she has on Tony— the two of them working in sync with each other as their body language communicates more than words ever could.

It inexplicably reminds him of Michelle, of the way he understood what she was saying without having to— only to realize that he didn’t always because unlike Pepper and Tony, they didn’t communicate nearly as well as these two did.

Or really, if Peter was honest with himself-- something he’s becoming a bit more comfortable in being-- because  _ he _ wasn’t communicating with  _ her _ . 

When Strange finishes his explanation for a second time, Pepper nods once— a hand gently squeezing Tony’s as she says, “Sounds as if you two have some finer details to work out.”

“Them two?” Peter asks, flabbergasted that he’s being kept out of the conversation about his own return back to normalcy when Pepper’s eyes drift back to Peter.

“I had a very interesting phone call with May Parker yesterday evening,” Pepper says carefully, Peter feeling a knot of guilt in his gut and not missing the way Tony’s back straightens slightly as if he was being reprimanded, “And I just had a couple of questions for Peter.”

“Oh,” Peter says, feeling completely out of his depth as his eyes dance between Strange and Tony, Pepper pressing forward.

“It won’t take long, just enough for you two to sort out whatever it is that you need,” she says kindly but firmly, Tony looking for a moment as if he wants to argue before thinking better of it as Pepper turns and smiles at Peter.

“Besides,” she says, “sounds as if everyone’s got a chance to have something of a heart to heart with you. I’d like the same.”

Peter laughs a little uncomfortably, Tony seemingly taking the lead on debating with next steps with Strange who doesn’t look particularly happy about the development. 

Peter’s focus is on Pepper who motions towards the couches that are in the living area as Tony and Strange have the decency to leave the room— Tony looking back curiously at the two of them before exiting.

“So,” Peter says, coughing once before sitting down on the couch, nervously running his hands up and down his thighs, “May called you?”

“She did,” Pepper says as she sits, “and had some very interesting things to say.”

“I’m really sorry about—” Peter begins only for Pepper to wave him away, smiling as she says, “she told me what you said, that it was an accident seeing her.”

“And you believe her?” Peter asks incredulously, Pepper looking almost sad as she nods.

“Of course, Peter. Why wouldn’t I?”

Peter’s leg starts to bob up and down, not missing the way Pepper’s eyes watch him do so as he tries to stop— wringing his hands together now as he says, “I don’t— no reason. I just—”

Peter stops himself, shaking his head. “It’s nothing.”

Pepper studies him, with a look that’s so much like  _ his _ Pepper that it’s unnerving— enough that he has to actively remind himself that they’re not the same person, the universe having given them two very different paths, this one being much kinder than his own.

Yet it’s  _ Pepper _ through and through when she finally speaks, folding her hands together as she says, “You’re a lot like him, you know.”

“Who?” He asks, though he has a guess to who he’s referring to. He’s been on the receiving end of this particular type of look and conversation enough in the years since Tony died, especially since he’d started using alcohol to self-medicate, to see the parallels between them.

Only to be completely surprised when she says, “Peter. Or,  _ our _ Peter, I should say.”

Peter’s head snaps up, frowning as he looks at her. “You-- you knew him?”

Pepper nods, a sad smile on her face as she says, “I don’t know how it was for you in your world but for me, I met Peter a few times. I saw what kind of influence he had on Tony but I didn’t--” Pepper takes a deep breath, Peter taken aback at how clearly he sees the  _ regret _ written across her face as she says, “I didn’t invest a lot of time into it because I wasn’t sure how long Tony would be… involved.”

Peter nods once, clicking his tongue as he says, “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Pepper looks uncharacteristically unsure of herself, at least uncharacteristic of the Pepper that he knows as she presses forward. “That isn’t to say that your-- your Tony wasn’t involved.”

“You don’t have to--”

“If he was anything like mine, losing you destroyed him.”

Peter stops, seeing a wide range of emotions run across Pepper’s face. Guilt, regret, grief and longing-- all things that Peter’s intimately acquainted with but wholly unprepared to see in Pepper’s eyes.

“He-- Peter, I mean, he seemed like a good kid. I,” Pepper laughs, a fond sound tinged with sadness, “I remember the first time I met him. It was probably a few weeks after Tony offered him to be a part of the Avengers which,” she shakes her head, “I still can’t  _ believe _ I let him get away with that, without talking to May.”

“You and May both,” Peter deadpans, Pepper smiling as she continues. 

“He-- he came by the Compound and I was there as a fluke. I did most of the SI business out in the city but Tony wanted to fly out together, on a vacation. Drove out there so we could go out early the next morning.”

Peter waits, watching the way Pepper’s eyes get lost in a memory as she smiles. 

“He-- Peter, I mean. We crossed paths right when he was leaving. Happy was taking him back to the city and he was so… so excited,” she says, guilt written across her features. “I had to take a call and I was distracted but he was-- he was very apologetic, almost. As if he didn’t want to be a bother.”

Peter smirks, Pepper’s eyes drifting back to him as she says, “I don’t think he realized how little of a bother he really was, to Tony most of all.”

Peter doesn’t quite know how to respond, especially since now thinking of it, he can’t remember when he met Pepper. If everything else in this timeline had been the same right up until the gauntlet had been fair game, it stood to reason that he and his own Pepper met the same way-- even if most of his interactions with Pepper now were filled with a longing, a grief, a regret and the empty space from a man who was no longer present with them. 

It makes sense that this Pepper’s memory of Peter was so hyper focused on the mundane first few meetings, if that was really all she had ever to go on.

Peter clears his throat as he says, “Some things never change I guess.”

Pepper frowns at the self-deprecation, Peter wincing as he goes to try and smooth it over before Pepper says, “Do you feel like a bother, Peter?” 

“In general or…” 

Pepper laughs, nodding her head once as he says, “I can’t exactly say this week has been particularly normal for any of us but you know, shit happens.”

“It does indeed,” Pepper replies, her expression turning thoughtful as she says, “Which is why I wanted to talk with you. There’s something that May said… something that’s made me wonder if we failed you, in a way.”

“Failed me? You didn’t--”

“Tony was a mess, after you died. The second time,” Pepper clarifies, Peter growing quiet with how unsteady Pepper’s voice gets. “In all our years together, I think that was the time when I really thought I was going to lose him.”

She takes a shaky breath, closing her eyes as she continues, “Tony got sober, after Morgan was born. But I thought that-- that losing you again, after we just  _ got _ you back…”

Pepper trails off, composing herself before finally opening her eyes and meeting Peter’s gaze.

“I realize that that was making me… be distant with you, something I wanted to apologize for.”

Peter quickly shakes his head as he says, “Pepper, you don’t have to—”

“But I do, for that and for not trying as much as I should’ve. May mentioned something and I just have to make it clear. You’re not— you’re not just a  _ symbol _ , Peter. You were— _ are _ — someone Tony loves, someone  _ we _ love. I won’t pretend we had a lot of interaction before the Snap but—”

“It’s really not a big deal, Pepper,” Peter says, eager to absolve the guilt of a woman who so clearly does not deserve to have any. Peter is the one who jumped into their world without warning, just as he’s the one who hadn’t made any more of an effort to connect with the three of them— running away instead of choosing to stay, something that makes him feel guilty for leaving Ned once again.

“It is and it brings me to my next point of what I wanted to talk to you about,” Pepper says, Peter going to try and say something only to be stopped in his tracks when she asks, “Do you want to go home?”

It’s so direct that it throws Peter, blinking at her a few times as he shakes his head, “I— I mean, of course, yeah. I want— I want to—”

_ Redo the past five years. Not be such a disappointment. Have people think better of me than what they do now.  _

“Do you  _ want  _ to go home?” Pepper asks, gently this time— letting Peter sit with the weight of a decision that he realizes he hasn’t even asked himself, hadn’t even thought to consider if it was an option.

Because of course it  _ isn’t  _ an option— it can’t be. The Peter of this world had left them all behind and he’s seen first hand what that would mean for May, for Ned, for MJ and everyone else in his world if he were to disappear without a trace, to leave their lives in an instant-- much less leaving without getting the chance to say goodbye. 

Peter can’t stay here, even if he wants to— but now that the option is presented to him, if the choice is there, it takes all his self-control for his mind not to run through how it would be. 

Spider-Man was dead but he was also believed in, Peter entertaining the purely selfish thought of what it would feel like for him to return— free of the baggage and the weight that he felt in his own world by being brought into this one. May could move forward without feeling guilty, Ned would be his best friend again and MJ… 

Peter grinds his teeth and ignores the ache in his chest at the idea that MJ would be with someone else, with  _ Harry  _ of all people but then, he reasons, it could be better, in a way— to know she’s happy and safe and to hope she’d be open to some kind of friendship free of the history that they had in his own world.

But even as his mind starts to entertain this fantasy, he dismisses it— thinking back to the words of a man wise beyond his years, to a wisdom that never got to see old age because of Peter’s selfishness.

Words about power and responsibility, of a truth that Peter lets settle in his gut as Pepper waits for his response. 

Peter couldn’t stay here. But as he looks back at Pepper, he’s thankful to her that she’s the first person to give him permission to want to. 

“I can’t stay,” Peter finally says, Pepper smiling at him as if she knew that’s what he was going to choose even if objectively she wouldn’t. 

She barely knew her Peter, by her own admission. It aches at him even then to think that he was choosing to make that permanent. 

“If I  _ can _ go home anyway,” Peter says with a laugh but there’s no humor in it, running a hand through his hair and tugging slightly at the root as he says, “universe seems to have it against me so who knows.”

“You think the universe has it out for you?” Pepper asks, sounding a little too much like the therapist he’d gone to all of three times right before he dropped out of ESU, getting the distinct impression that this is something she’s done with Tony before. 

Peter snorts, bringing his hand down from his hair as he gestures to the room they’re in. “Kind of obvious right?”

Pepper frowns, studying him for a moment as Peter barrels forward. “I mean look at it, Strange said there were two outcomes right? Two,” Peter throws up two fingers, using the other to point to his index as he says, “First one or— mine or whatever, Tony dies and I’m the fuckup who failed to live up to expectations.”

Pepper’s frown deepens, Peter moving his hand to point to his middle finger as he says, “And this one, I’m dead yeah, but everyone’s— everyone’s doing okay. Relatively speaking. I’m still dead but that’s just-- that’s just how it works, I guess,” Peter amends before Pepper can interrupt, even if there’s a line in the middle of her forehead that he’s seen several times— usually when someone messed up some deal at SI or interrupted her time with Morgan.

“So yeah, chances are that Strange found the solution and I’m still somehow gonna get fucked over. Or land in some nightmare dimension or die or something because that’s just… Parker luck,” Peter says with a sigh, bringing his hands down and shoulders sagging as he blows air out of his mouth. 

There’s a beat of silence, Peter hearing back his words and how self-pitying they sound, only for Pepper to hit right at the root in that way she seems to do in any dimension when she says, “The universe is not against you, Peter.”

“I know, I didn’t—” Peter begins, only to be thrown off guard when Pepper says, “The universe would have to care about you enough for that.”

Peter blinks at her, dumbfounded at how callous her words are only to be further confused with the calm radiating from her— something just barely whispering to him in the back of his mind as he says, “Ouch?”

Pepper smiles but there’s no joy in it, more a resolve that illustrates to him in seconds why Pepper was so successful at what she did as she says, “I know all of this stuff, the multiverse and dimensions and space stones are beyond what any normal person should ever have to deal with but this is something I’ve told Tony over and over again.”

She reaches both her hands out, Peter gently taking them as Pepper leans in— a ferocity in her expression that makes him want to take a step back while still being rooted in place as her eyes search his.

“You are not the center of the universe.”

“I know—”

“I don't think you do,” Pepper says gently, firmly, tightening her grip, “and I know it’s hard to remember that because of what people like you and Tony deal with but if you forget everything I tell you, remember this.”

Peter waits with bated breath, holding her gaze as Pepper says, “the universe is not against you because you are  _ not  _ at the center. Frankly, I don’t give a shit with Stephen says about two timelines, not when it’s evident from how much he and Tony are arguing that there’s still so much we don’t know about how any of this works.”

Peter huffs out a laugh, the corner of Pepper’s mouth upturning as she presses forward, “There things that happen in this life. Sometimes they make sense but most of the time, they don’t. And it’s not because you did something to cause them or some force out there predestined you to do it. We make our choices every single day, with whatever is available to us. In this world, I made the choice to be with Tony, to have Morgan, to run a company that every day makes me want to tear my hair out.”

She smiles, gripping his hand even tighter, “And in another life, in your world, I made different choices.”

“You only had to make them because of what Tony did, what I  _ didn’t  _ do,” Peter says, his voice wavering slightly as Pepper resolutely shakes her head.

“They were still  _ my choices _ , Peter.  _ My  _ choices that I made just as Tony made his own choice in your universe. Just as the you in this one made his, causing all of us to have to choose different ways to live our lives.”

“But that’s just it, you—” Peter says, “you  _ didn’t  _ get to decide to lose Tony, he— he did that because I didn’t— I couldn’t—”

“You’re not understanding me, Peter,” Pepper says, dropping his hands and bringing her own to cradle his face, Peter freezing at the gentleness of her touch as she smiles at him. 

“You do not get to decide what happens to you but you  _ do  _ get to decide what you do with the aftermath. The universe is— is vast and complex and still so unknowable. It’s impossible to try and make sense of it,” she says with so much conviction, enough that it makes Peter want to believe her even if he can count on both hands people who objectively  _ do  _ know so many secrets of the universe.

Pepper seems to register his change, eyes searching his face as she says, “I’m not saying I know more than some alien space god,” her words causing Peter to laugh as she continues, “but I know right here, right now, I  _ chose  _ to speak with you tonight, to right my wrong as best I could and make peace with all the other things I couldn’t change.”

She brings her hands down, Peter holding her gaze as she smiles at him— the conviction in her words and in her eyes so clear as she says, “You will run yourself to the ground trying to find answers for questions where there are none.”

Peter inexplicably thinks of May’s words to him again—  _ his  _ May, the night before he got transplanted to this bizarro universe and the question posed to him of who he was outside of Spider-Man, now filtered through first-hand knowledge of what it was like to live in a world where Peter Parker was long dead but  _ Spider-Man _ — and the legend behind him— still lived on.

“You don’t always get to have the answers but you do get to  _ decide _ , to make your choice of what your life will be with what’s given to you,” she says, hearing May’s words echo back at him.

_ You need to figure out how you’re going to continue to do this. Figure out what kind of person you want to be. _

Peter swallows down something in his throat, Pepper’s eyes boring into his as she says the words that click everything into place. 

“You get to decide, Peter. Don’t forget that.” 

***

When Pepper steps out of the room to go and retrieve Tony and Strange for the impending conversation of  _ leaving, _ Peter knows that it’s as much her way of giving him a minute to absorb her words as it is an actual logistical move. 

And he does. 

He moves to the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down at the breakfast bar where Tony had fed him eggs and fried guilt earlier that morning and he absorbs. 

Pepper Potts is right, of course, because for as long as he’s known her (and much longer than that) she always has been, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy pill to swallow. 

His own self-centeredness keeps trying to choke his newfound awareness of it back up in some prickly hairball of a mess, and Peter swallows it down with full mouthfuls of coffee, lets it sit hot in his gut because he can’t just give it up. It’s the key to being better, he thinks, and he can’t just give that up. 

“Mister Parker, I believe you have a visitor coming up the elevator.” 

“What?” Peter looks up as he always did as a teenager, back when it still felt like he was living in a fantasy novel and Friday lived in the ceiling. “I don’t-- Friday, no one knows I’m here.”

“That does not appear to be the case,” Friday responds simply, but before Peter can continue to question whether or not the AI is actively malfunctioning, the elevator doors slide open to reveal a nearly-frantic Ned Leeds. 

“Jesus Christ,” Ned lets out in a huff of breath when his eyes lock onto a gobsmacked Peter. “You’re an ass, do you know-- Like, I’m great at what I do but it’s not exactly easy to hack into Tony Stark’s personal business--”

“I-- Ned-- What are you--?” Peter sputters over his words as he stumbles off of his stool and straight into Ned’s too-tight embrace. “Okay,” he breathes, he holds his friend in return, he absorbs just a little bit more. 

There’s still a touch of fire in Ned’s eyes when he pulls away to look over Peter, but it’s mostly drowned out by something a bit more melancholy, something else that Peter doesn’t know how to name. 

“I’m sorry,” Peter says automatically, and although he means it, the words are also an instinct at this point. 

“You just disappeared,” Ned implores quietly. 

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You didn’t say goodbye.”

Peter clenches his jaw shut tight, because that’s the bit without a name. It’s a little bit like fear, and Peter put it there. 

He pushes his own self hatred down, tries not to give it a voice in this conversation--  _ not the place not the time not the person-- _ and instead just breathes. Oxygen and honesty feeding straight into his veins. 

“I’m glad you came,” he says. “It looks-- Um, it looks like I might be able to go back.”

Ned smiles, small and sad. “I figured as much,” he shrugs. “I’m just glad I wasn’t too late, that you’re not already-- y’know.” 

_ Gone. _

“Yeah,” Peter nods earnestly. “Yeah, man. Me too.” 

Ned breathes in through his nose, exhales as he asks, “So how is it going to work?”

Peter slumps back onto his stool and motions for Ned to join him as he chuckles at himself. 

“Purple rock and a magic spell?” he shrugs. “They’ll be back to tell me the details soon, I guess.”

The face that Ned makes says  _ fair enough _ as he nods, but as he lets out a deadpanned, “Sure,” Peter can still see that he’s clearly ramping up to something. 

He bounces his leg, arch of his foot digging into the rung of his stool as he tries to wait it out, tries not to step on Ned’s toes before he finds his words, tries not to take this moment from him. 

Tries to be unselfish, ultimately, in the knowledge that when Peter leaves here, he’s leaving to see his people again, his Ned, while this young man sitting in front of him will return to a life without. 

But maybe Peter can leave something behind for him-- a memory of this moment in which he listened, in which he let Ned say a proper goodbye in whatever way he needed, in whatever way he never had the opportunity for with his own Peter Parker. 

Ned Leeds, however, has always been full of surprises, and this continues to be the case when he finally opens his mouth. 

“Don’t be mad at me,” he looks at Peter, pleading but still somehow certain as Peter reels back a little bit. 

“Okay,” he replies, gripping the body of his mug a little tighter.

Ned takes a deep breath. “I talked to MJ,” he says and Peter slams his mug down a little too hard, considering the decision to do so had come out of a desire not to crack the ceramic in his hands. 

“You…”

“I told her about what’s going on,” Ned explains. “About you.” 

It’s been a long week, a long night leading into a long morning. 

A long, long, too long life in all of its obvious shortness.

All of those things and some others that Peter’s not aware of as his head spins-- like a top, or like thread, maybe even a web. Part of him wants to immediately blurt out a series of questions which he has not earned the answers to and part of him wants to run away (something that he’s new to, but not so inexperienced at anymore) and part of him just wants to go home. 

Genuinely. Sincerely wants to go home-- that same urge he remembers from being a child who didn’t understand yet why his vacation to his aunt and uncle’s house was being extended. Naive and aching and the most real anything has felt all week. 

He’s grateful that Pepper asked because now he’s certain. He  _ wants _ to go home to her, to all of them, no matter how much it hurts. 

“What did she say?” he contains himself to one question, a feat beyond even his own expectations. 

“Well,” Ned reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a wallet. “She actually, um-- Well, here.”

He pulls out a piece of paper, folded half a dozen times over, and hands it to Peter who gingerly accepts. There’s a weight to it, not just emotional anticipation but also physically, of the paper itself. The sort of paper you find in a sketchbook, which makes his lips turn up just slightly at the ends, a brief moment of quiet giddiness at that sense of familiarity. 

“I didn’t read it,” Ned tells him, when Peter supposes he’s been staring at a folded piece of scratch paper for just a beat too long. “But I think-- I think you should.”

Peter lets his gaze fall back down to the note, runs his thumbs over it one last time, and then opens it to reveal three concise sentences in a familiar handwriting, a familiar smudging graphite. 

_ I hear we’re something of an item where you’re from.  _

_ I know Ned told you that I never got to love you for real-- I’m glad that she gets to.  _

_ Don’t waste it, Parker.  _

She had signed her name, a small  _ MJ _ at the bottom, right beside a doodle of a heart-shaped Spider-Man mask and Peter scratches worn-down nails over his jawline as he expels a bursting, watery sort of laugh. 

_ Don’t waste it, _ she tells him. Again as he rereads it, once more as he hears the words in her voice across worlds. 

“Hey, uh,” he swipes at his face before looking back at Ned. “You got a pen on you by chance?”

Ned just looks at him knowingly and pulls a pen out of a pocket, ready to go as if he had been expecting this as he slides it across the bar for Peter. 

He sets the paper down in front of him, clicks the pen a few times, and thinks about all the things that he wants her to know. And then he thinks a little harder-- separates out the things he wants  _ her _ to know and the things he wants his ex-girlfriend to know. 

And then, finally, he hears Pepper’s voice in his head and he thinks about what it is this Michelle Jones needs to hear. Because it’s not about him. 

_ I won’t if you won’t, _ he writes. 

_ Go get ‘em, Jones, _ he writes. 

_ He’d be crazy fucking proud of you, _ he writes.  _ And so am I.  _

The scrawl of  _ Peter _ below his short message is chicken-scratchy and nearly illegible, but he figures she’ll get the gist as he folds it back up over the same creases and hands it back to Ned. 

“Mister Parker,” Friday speaks up as Ned slides the note back into his pocket and Peter takes a deep breath, knowing what’s coming. “Boss wanted me to inform you that he is on his way back.” 

“That’s my cue,” Ned smiles half-heartedly as he stands. 

“You don’t wanna stick around for the show?” Peter suggests, hopeful and selfish in his desire to be able to hold Ned’s hand through this, but Ned shakes his head sympathetically. 

“I think, um,” he clears his throat. “I think I’d rather say goodbye now. If that’s okay?”

The way Peter hugs him at that, the way he says  _ of course, _ the way he actively tries to burn the moment into his memory and Ned’s alike is tight and true and conscious enough that Peter hopes it transcends time and space and reality. 

Perhaps it does, just by them being who they are to each other, who they  _ aren’t _ to each other. Perhaps the complexity of it is what makes that hug feel more simple than all the rest, and perhaps it doesn’t matter either way. 

Because the fact of the matter is that although saying goodbye is hard, impossible, unbearable-- despite all of that, it’s still eons better than not saying goodbye at all. 

“Okay,” Ned sniffs loudly as he steps back, a watery breath of a laugh on the tip of his tongue as he presses his hands into Peter’s shoulders. Holding him in place, just for a few moments longer. “Okay, I should go.”

“Okay,” Peter nods. “Just, um-- I know I don’t get to speak for him, but--” he cuts himself off with a sharp breath, has to look down at his shoes and then back up at Ned. “I get to speak for me, y’know? And I’m just-- crazy happy for you.”

Ned makes a face, something overwhelmed but self-deprecating but accepting still all the same. 

“I’m serious,” Peter insists, smile broadening on his own face, grabbing Ned’s wrists where he still holds him by the shoulders and squeezing. “You, Ned Leeds, are the greatest guy in the chair there ever was.” 

Ned pulls him in again, and Peter thinks it’s to hide his face as much as anything else, but leans into the embrace nonetheless. 

“Thank you,” Ned says, and then he pulls away and starts backing up towards the elevator. “Thank you, and-- y’know-- live it up, alright?”

“Will do,” Peter stays where he is, smiling and crying and watching Ned do the same as he presses the call button. It still feels like a promise he isn’t sure he can keep, but he wants to try, and that has to count for something. 

“Good, alright,” Ned nods. “Great.”

“I love you, man,” Peter tells him as he steps through the sliding doors. 

Ned chokes on something-- longing maybe, probably grief-- and he says, “I love you too, Peter.” 

Peter waves, of all things, he  _ waves  _ as the doors close and watches Ned press a hand to his chest, a quick nod with a trembling jaw before he disappears from view entirely. 

***

There’s a Ned Leeds where he comes from. 

Peter promises himself, not that he won’t let that Ned Leeds down, because realistically that’s not true, but that he  _ will _ \-- definitely, undeniably-- remember to thank him more often. 

***

There’s hardly a beat to collect the feeling of it and put it in his pocket before Tony is rounding the corner and looking at him curiously-- the only clue he gives that Peter looks at all out of sorts. He is, of course, and they both know this, but the whole amalgamation of reasons doesn’t necessarily need to be explored in this moment. 

Tony pauses, probably ten or so feet away before stepping closer and tucking his hands pseudo-casually into his pockets.

“Strange is setting up out on the lawn,” he says, clearing his throat afterwards, seeming to work past a lump caught there, although neither one of them will point it out. “Apparently there’s a chance whatever he’s doing will leave-- singe marks? I dunno, I’m bringing a fire extinguisher just in case.” 

“Yeah, solid plan,” Peter nods, hitting a tone just around the same level of  _ trying to be regular _ as Tony’s. 

Although, really, what was this if not entirely regular? If not for the general public, then for them, at least. 

The likes of Tony and Peter had never truly known actual, legitimate peace in their lifetimes, as much as they may have tried, as much as they may still be trying, there continue to be some wants that will always be out of reach. 

Extra time, for one. Time to pause and time to talk and time to grow and love and forget and remember and  _ yell. _

Time, that one ultimate villain in their improbable, impossible lives. 

So Peter laughs, because it’s awkward in such a regular way and his heart hurts in such a regular way and he regrets and hopes in breaths of another Peter’s unused air. 

“What?” Tony’s countenance cracks, something like amusement filling his eyes as he furrows his brow at Peter’s nearly doubled-over form. 

“Nothing,” Peter laughs. “Nothing, just-- God.  _ God.” _

“Yeah,” Tony chuckles. 

“Is it crazy that I’m not ready?” Peter shakes his head, humor in his voice tangling up with sorrow. Always, with the sorrow. “All of this-- This whole week begging the universe but I’m not-- I don’t think I’m  _ ready.” _

“I know,” Tony breathed, a smile of a thing, unsteady but genuine. “That’s the fucking way of the road for us, kid.” 

It goes unspoken, the fact that there is still much that will go forever unspoken. Or, at least, Tony’s comment is the closest they get to saying it out loud. Broken men who have lost too much, willingly giving it up all over again, willingly giving in to the cruel passage of time and the vicious tear of grief. 

“Yeah,” Peter sobers a little bit, but that wry smile still stuck to his lips, stuck in the posture of his shoulders. “I’m sorry, you know-- for, um, showing up and blowing your life up.” 

“Retirement is boring,” Tony shrugs. “I could use a good ‘ole explosion every now and then.” 

“Well, in that case you’re welcome,” Peter says with a faltering glibness. 

Tony crosses his arms over his chest and Peter can see the amusement fade to thoughtfulness as he clearly has some type of internal battle as to what he’s going to say next. 

“I know I have no right to ask anything of you,” he eventually speaks up. 

Peter shrugs. “Ask anyway.”

Tony meets his gaze deliberately. 

“Look after them?”

It’s pleading but not in a sad way, more so just hopeful, almost poignant if that was a word that could ever describe the softness that this Tony Stark has found with age and time. 

“I will,” Peter promises. “I’ll try,” he promises more accurately. 

He considers asking the same of Tony, but something tells him it doesn’t need to be said. May will be okay here-- not alone whether Tony steps in to put those pieces back together or not. And so will Ned and MJ, having each other-- having more than each other in the grand scheme of things. 

“Doctor Strange is asking for your presence on the south lawn, boss,” Friday says before Tony can do more than offer Peter a look of gratitude across the space between them. 

“Thanks, Fri,” Tony says without looking away from Peter, as though committing him to memory. 

“Time to go, I guess,” Peter clears his throat. 

Tony takes a deep breath and lets it out harshly. 

“Time to go.”

***

Strange is waiting for them when they make it to the south lawn, and the fact that it’s the same place they both last saw each other doesn’t hit Peter until they’re standing there at the site of the end of a battle, the end of a life, the start of something else. 

Peter listens as carefully as he can to Strange’s explanation of the process to come while still looking out across the too-green grass (only too green because of the lack of rubble, lack of fire and brimstone and death). 

Pepper joins them on the lawn, and she hugs him when he thanks her quietly. He startles at the feeling of it, leans into her embrace in spite of himself, not thinking too hard about how he hasn’t been hugged this many times in one day in longer than he cares to admit. 

Longer than he cares to admit because he knows it’s his own fault. 

“I’m grateful to have met you,” she says, earnest in her own faltering steadiness. 

“You too,” he replies, just as grateful to have seen her living this version of her life as he was weighed down by it. But he smiles anyway, and he lets her squeeze his hand and give him a knowing look before he turns his gaze to Tony. 

He thinks about the surprise on Tony’s face when he turned around and they came face to face for the first time. He thinks about the all-consuming suffocation of the lake house, about how much he wishes that hadn’t been the case despite knowing that the circumstances involved, the people involved, made the whole thing inevitable. 

A long time ago, there was a boy who ached for this chance, who desired it so deeply that it leached its way into everything else. Peter does what he can to let that boy sit at the forefront of his brain for a moment, opens up the cage he’s built to try and keep that boy safe and tries not to run away from the feeling of it. 

Tony tilts his head in a silent question and Peter gathers himself, he doesn’t run away, he doesn’t run. 

Instead, Peter sucks it up and takes an abrupt step forward to wrap his arms around Tony, hook his chin over his shoulder and hold on tight. Just for a moment, a first and a last in some attempt to make up for the wasted days, the wasted years, the wasted time, time, time always running through their fingers. 

He holds him, and Tony holds him back with an equal fervor and desperation and regret because this is all they have. This is all they get. 

“You’re gonna do good,” Tony says as one hand grips the back of Peter’s neck. “I know it.”

“You too,” is Peter’s automatic response, as if he won’t be replaying those words in his head for years to come. “They’re lucky to have you.”

Tony makes a sound at the back of his throat and it’s the kind of sound that there are no words to replicate but that Peter wants to agree with nonetheless. Because they’re so lucky in the midst of their unluckiness and it’s taken all week for Peter to see that but he thinks he gets it now, as he finally pulls away from Tony and steps back into the space Strange has designated with a harsh sniff. 

Peter watches as Pepper wraps an arm around Tony’s waist, as he rests one across her shoulders in response, and his heart breaks and mends and breaks all over again. 

The boy from many years ago cries, but Peter’s eyes are dry. 

“Ready?” Strange asks, a quirk of his brow as he studies Peter’s face. 

He’s not. He never has been. He never will be. 

He nods. 

“Let’s do it,” he says with all the strength he can muster and Strange returns a nod of understanding before he hands Peter the stone. 

It’s the same as it was, purple and otherworldly, and Peter can’t find it in himself to resent it despite all the ways it’s fucked with him. 

He squeezes it in between the pads of his fingers as Strange begins an incantation that Peter’s brain has no space to properly process, and in the face of it all, he smiles. 

“Catch ya later, Mister Stark,” he says, shoulders hunched up by his ears and grin taking over the whole of his frightened face. 

Tony lets out a bubble of a surprised laugh. “Catch ya later, Underoos,” he grins right back. 

Peter doesn’t look away from him, from the way he covers up his mouth with a hand, the way he cries for someone else-- for someone else and for him, all at the same time. 

It’s his hearing that fades first, the sound of Strange’s recitation slowly morphing into white noise. 

After that comes the hot, white light that fills his vision, blocking out the face that he will never see again, blocking out the world that is not his but will always live on in his heart and head and lungs. 

There’s that blinding pain, and he’s being pulled apart all over again, just in a different way than his words with Pepper, with Tony, with Ned and with May. 

And then nothing. 

Nothing at all. 

Nothing, stretching out for miles, for lightyears, for eons in every non-existent direction. 

Nothing, nothing, nothing, until--

_ Everything.  _

***

On a new day, in an old world, with his same body, Peter Parker wakes up with a gasp. 

**Author's Note:**

> Save an author, leave a comment. Come hang out with us on tumblr: [prem](https://premiere-pro.tumblr.com) and [seek](https://pursue-solitude.tumblr.com)


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